Rose, Isaac and Watt, Paul (2025) We are being squeezed out: studentification, working-class displacement and resistance in Hulme, Manchester. City, 29 (5-6). 888 - 923. ISSN 1360-4813
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
This paper examines the nature of ‘studentification’ in Hulme, an inner-city area of Manchester, and how this process is responded to by working-class residents of the neighbourhood. We pay particular attention to the building of purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA), which we characterise as a distinctive ‘second stage’ of studentification which, following Baldwin (2021. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. London: Hachette UK) and his notion of the ‘UniverCity’, we conceptualise as the corporate ‘univercityfication’ of Manchester and Hulme. We locate the temporal nature of studentification within a broader ‘long view’ perspective on housing and urban policy—in this case the multiple rounds of demolition and redevelopment that Hulme has experienced since the 1950s. Hulme residents have played an active role in relation to such redevelopment, often contesting the various plans which have been put forward, including the recent PBSA developments. Although Hulme has been a home to students dating back to the 1970s, their co-presence has taken on an increasingly threatening form during the last decade due to the development of a new university campus and large-scale PBSA building. Such development is a key part of Manchester's urban policy strategy, a city well-known for its neoliberal tendencies. The paper argues that Hulme’s working-class population has shifted in its response to such studentification: from initial welcoming to outright opposition to the latest PBSA planning incarnations. We analyse how and why this changing response has occurred and emphasise how PBSA operates as a highly exclusionary mechanism within urban redevelopment. Working-class Hulme residents have witnessed the loss of their previous community facilities and are increasingly experiencing both ‘displacement pressure’ (Marcuse. 1985. “Gentrification, Abandonment and Displacement: Connections, Causes, and Policy Responses in New York City.” Wash. UJ Urb. & Contemp. L. 28: 195), and ‘displacement anxiety’ (Watt 2018. “‘This Pain of Moving, Moving, Moving’: Evictions, Displacement and Logics of Expulsion in London.” L’ Année sociologique 68 (1): 67–100. https://doi.org/10.3917/anso.181.0067). They anticipate that the remaining social housing will eventually be demolished and they themselves—‘a community of ghosts’—will be physically relocated away from the area. Such displacement concerns underpin the local ‘Block the Block’ campaign which vigorously challenged the latest PBSA proposal on the site of an old pub from 2020 to 2024.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group |
| Divisions: | Sociology |
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races H Social Sciences > HM Sociology |
| Date Deposited: | 20 Nov 2025 13:42 |
| Last Modified: | 11 Dec 2025 20:15 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/130272 |
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