Tom Slater

Slater works at dismantling terms that sound technical and are political. «Regeneration», «social mix» or «neighbourhood effects» sound like neutral diagnoses and in practice justify demolitions and rehousing, shifting the blame for poverty from structures onto poor neighbourhoods themselves.

He also showed that gentrification research studied those arriving in great detail and those leaving hardly at all, because displaced people are hard to trace. The result is a literature that measures arrival well and barely records expulsion.

A British geographer, professor of urban geography at the University of Edinburgh, Slater made his name in 2006 with an article denouncing the eviction of critical perspectives from gentrification research: studies celebrating social mix and regeneration had stopped looking at the displaced. With Loretta Lees and Elvin Wyly he wrote Gentrification (2008), the textbook that fixed the state of the field, and since then he has investigated how British housing policy manufactures the displacement it later calls renewal.

Shaking Up the City (2021) collects his battles with fashionable concepts: resilience, neighbourhood effects, social mix and territorial stigmatisation, which he studied with Loïc Wacquant and which explains how discrediting a neighbourhood prepares its demolition. His work is polemical by design, and critics reproach it for leaving little room for nuance; its value lies in reminding us that behind every kind word of urban policy there is someone losing their home.

In a 2018 study he traced the origin of the phrase sink estate, which the British press and government used to label social housing estates, and showed how that label, repeated until it passed for a description, prepared the ground for their demolition. He called it the production of ignorance: a vocabulary that hides the causes of the problem, namely lack of investment and of affordable housing, and shifts the blame onto the people who live there.