On three protest pins and a postcard, held in the CCA Collection, reads “Rescue Robin Hood”—the ironic slogan of the 2008 campaign by Building Design magazine and Twentieth Century Society against the planned demolition of the Robin Hood Gardens housing estate. The building, located in Poplar, East London and designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, was completed in 1972, only thirty-six years prior. I find these small, archived remnants of the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to be an arresting example of a movement that sought to oppose a demolition that was deemed unnecessary by tenants and communities but ultimately demanded by capitalism. This material is even more important to look back on now as the demolition of the Robin Hood Gardens housing estate in London, which began in 2017, was completed just a few months ago, in early March 2025. The pace at which urban neoliberalization operates creates an urgent need to collect and create archives of community resistance against the demolition of housing estates, and those archives, in turn, give a lasting voice to communities of tenants and activists who organized for their right to the city.

The ever-increasing tendency to demolish buildings has become the default mode of construction in globalized cities, which are constantly reconfiguring themselves towards economic profit and according to movements of capital. My own experience, growing up in social housing on the periphery of Paris, has allowed me to be a direct, albeit powerless, witness of the urban processes of gentrification. Almost stateless, and rather than being heralded by an ideology, this tendency to demolish and rebuild is a requirement of capitalism, but one that has branded itself in various ways. In no city have I witnessed the rapidity of urban neoliberalization more starkly than in London, where allowing the influx of capital is the single most pressing matter to influence the progression of the city. Saskia Sassen, in The Global City, argues that “gentrification emerged as a spatial component of this transformation.”¹ I found the marketed ways of normalizing these capitalist dynamics, and their associated vocabulary, striking. Terms such as “regeneration” and “redevelopment” are used ubiquitously to embellish the process of demolition and falsely suggest that the latter works from and in favour of the existing.

Capitalism, as our reigning economic system, is unwavering, and together with globalization has led to a near-uniformity of urban forms. The most important and noticeable differences between global cities, I have found, are the amount and intensity of the mitigation efforts that are put in place locally. Just as I was impressed by the scale and urban translation of neoliberalism in London, I also found that there were ongoing efforts of resistance responding to it in profoundly impactful ways.

In London, community archivism around housing estates has taken different forms. For instance, the 56A Infoshop self-managed community archives in Elephant and Castle are a singular illustration of the struggles led by Londoners against gentrification and capitalism’s consequences on the spaces they inhabit. Its collection spans community resistance across many estates in London, mainly from the 1980s up to the present day. By systematically archiving grassroots, community activism, the work of 56A Infoshop acknowledges the importance of these struggles in the unfolding history of London and addresses the gap within institutional archives around ongoing resistance movements to capitalism’s effects on the city and its communities.

In decade-spanning processes of estate demolition and gentrification, communities of social housing tenants have organised in favour of renovation and have developed new community archivistic practices. Aylesbury Estate in Walworth, South East London, designed by Hans Peter “Felix” Trenton, was built in the same period as Robin Hood Gardens, with construction completing in 1977. In April 2023, an exhibition retracing the struggle against the ongoing demolition of the estate was held in the flat of a long-term tenant, Aysen Dennis. Each room of the flat told a story of resistance through numerous artefacts. This exhibition was the culmination of a documented process of dispossession, and a way to express a community’s right to their neighbourhood and city.

Loretta Lees, a scholar of gentrification, has highlighted the gap in studies focusing on the lived consequences of gentrification and displacement. In a co-authored academic paper with a displaced tenant of the Aylesbury Estate, Beverley Robinson, Lees argues that “displacing people from their homes in the name of regeneration (in this case council estate renewal) is something that impacts their mental and physical well-being, but in gentrification studies these impacts have been under-explored.”¹ To resist gentrification, as a tenant undergoing forced displacement, becomes a mandatory struggle against the forces of social cleansing.

Most of the inhabitants of the Robin Hood Gardens estate were allocated a social housing flat by the Tower Hamlets Council. Many of the households consisted of immigrant families, as with many neighbourhoods in East London, which constitutes the heart of South Asian diasporas in London. Plans for the demolition of the estate emerged as early as the late 2000s. At this time, the Tower Hamlets Council launched a neighbourhood-wide process of regeneration for the existing housing in the area to accommodate the nearby redeveloped financial district of Canary Wharf.

Contemporary processes of estate demolition and community displacement reveal the limited agency of social housing tenants. First allocated housing estate flats by the Council, tenants’ displacement through urban renewal, is also controlled by the Council as they decide when they will leave. A social housing tenant does not choose when they move in or out—the very notion of choice and agency in one’s place of living and living conditions is exclusively reserved for property owners. As such, the right to the city of tenants is challenged because the city operates in favour of capital, rather than its inhabitants. Alongside this, as the notion of periphery and centre in London is not strictly defined, and the public transport system is wide-reaching and still developing further, there are no limits to how far gentrification can extend and how many people it will displace. The replacement of ongoing social housing tenants with new populations can also be understood as a form of ethnic cleansing. The communities that formed in those shared spaces of living are bound to disappear as there is no strict framework on rehousing tenants, who can be imposed a new flat in a different borough.

A major issue in London’s urban reorganization is the inability or unwillingness of local actors to impose a framework around urban renewal. Starting with the Councils—the prevailing neighbourhood authority—there are no guaranteed rights for social housing tenants, because these tenants are not profitable.

In 2008, Robin Hood Gardens was included in the Twentieth Century Society’s “Risk List”, a yearly initiative which highlights modern buildings across the United Kingdom which are at urgent risk of demolition.¹ This initiative, alongside the petition for which the postcard and pins were produced, gave public visibility to the process of demolition of the estate. However, the emphasis on an assumed inherent architectural value of the building, with the willingness to get the estate listed as being of architectural importance and deserving of special protection by Historic England, and therefore prevent it from being demolished, was, while strategic, not the most urgent threat to base this campaign on.

The postcard and buttons from the Rescue Robin Hood campaign used a photograph taken shortly after the construction of the estate in 1973, with its wide green public lawns on the foreground, as children are seen playing and enjoying the outdoors. This depicts a vivid scene of the social life in the estate shortly after its construction, and such hopeful images are frequently made and reused to portray an image of housing estates that match their architects’ vision. However, none of the imagery of the campaign gives a sense of the lives of the tenants who were living in the estate when those documents were produced, in 2008. This choice highlights a disconnect between the campaign’s value of the building’s design and intentions and the actual value it had at that time to those living there. A case could have been made against the demolition of the estate without attempting to idealize it.

Considerations of the value of design, in residential buildings, should not be prioritized over the lived realities of the inhabitants—the consequences of such a demolition are complex, impacting the community, the environment, and the cultural heritage of the area. Regularly, in demolition processes, the poor living conditions of the building are used as justification to demolish, while it is often the neglect and lack of care given by the Council (and other local authorities) in maintaining these buildings that has led to the decay of the housing conditions. This justification disguises the responsibility and failure of the authorities of ensuring that the building is liveable.

I have come across a variety of written and audiovisual testimonies from inhabitants of Robin Hood Gardens who describe life in the estate more or less enthusiastically. The most common benefit they found in living in the estate was the sense of community that was formed from the wide shared balconies, or “streets in the sky”. A resident recalls “In Eid, the doors would be open in every house and you would have all these people, swathes of people going up and down the corridors in their glitzy outfits, going to people’s houses. It gave you the opportunity to live an outdoor life.”¹

Interestingly, surveys interrogating the tenants on their views for the future of the estate obtained drastically different results based on the source of the survey. During a consultation carried out by Tower Hamlets Council at the onset of the regeneration proposal around March 2008, it was found that “75% of residents said they would like to see Robin Hood Gardens knocked down and replaced.”² On the contrary, a survey led by a resident of the estate in June 2009 and published in Building Design found that 80% of residents wanted their estate to be refurbished rather than demolished.³ We may argue that these differences are due to the way that plans for demolition were explained to and then interpreted by the tenants. The Council, which was eager to demolish the estate and redevelop the site, may have framed their plans to the tenants in a way which gave them hope to be rehoused in a better building in an equally good location—perhaps, without emphasizing the possibility of refurbishment of the estate, and the limited long-term impacts that the demolition and redevelopment would have on their lives. In this case, as with many others, the tenants who had lived in Robin Hood Gardens were rehoused away from their initial communities, and their lives were considerably disrupted.⁴

Perhaps the biggest lesson to draw from the failed campaign against the demolition of Robin Hood Gardens is that the motivations for demolition are driven by the need to make profit. To demolish inhabited buildings, which could be refurbished, and to displace communities is not an isolated occurrence. This represents a systemic issue, which calls for strategies of resistance. The plans for the demolition of Robin Hood Gardens emerged in 2008, just 36 years after it was built. Its demolition was completed in 2025, and the development of urban blight and the deterioration of living conditions for the remaining inhabitants in the estate between the onset of the demolition in 2017 and its completion in 2025 was an awful consequence of the lack of consideration for tenants’ lives by the authorities leading the regeneration project.

Paul Watt, in his chapter analyzing community resistance to regeneration projects in London, argues that “contestation is often long-term—a form of trench warfare—reflecting the interminable nature of regeneration itself.”⁵ We may further argue that the involvement of the architectural community in the fight against the demolition of Robin Hood Gardens was a disservice in that it came too late, once demolition was being proposed as the solution, and did not sufficiently address the poor quality of life in the estate which would have necessitated refurbishment, and was ultimately the justification for the demolition. The short lifespan of Robin Hood Gardens, from 1972 to 2025, highlights the urgency of questioning what it means to place efforts into futureproofing social housing buildings and their communities.

While the demolition of Robin Hood Gardens is complete, the efforts of resistance against estate demolitions and their impacts are an important part of the contemporary urban history of London. From the prospective plans for demolition to the displacement of the final social housing tenants, these processes often represent decades of tenants’ lives. The question of archiving material linked to resistance to gentrification is important, as it tells a social history, and may also be used to improve architects’ approaches to design and maintenance of housing. Many architects who were commissioned housing estates in European capitals after the Second World War imbued their designs with an idealized vision, and Alison and Peter Smithson were notably part of Team X, a group of architects who participated in the ninth International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), and thereafter the Smithsons developed their New Brutalist style.¹ However, these visions did not always prove successful long-term, as social housing is seldom given sufficient means to be appropriately maintained. When a housing project becomes almost undefendable in the eyes of their architect, these buildings are given new meaning by their inhabitants. Archives of material produced by and around tenants’ self-reflexive struggles become ways of understanding these designs anew.