Introduction

Social mixing, less segregation and more ‘socially balanced’ neighbourhoods all seem like inherently positive policy ambitions. Why, then, have a raft of urban policy programmes that have placed the goal of social mixing at their core been subject to, at times, condemning criticism (N. Smith, 2002; Slater, 2006; Lees, 2008)? The answer proposed here is that the current policy-led push to generate social mixing and socially mixed neighbourhoods through ‘social upgrading’ has contained a deeply problematic understanding of class dynamics and politics. This, it is argued, is symptomatic of a wider treatment of the question of class in the neoliberal period (Peck and Tickell, 2002a, 2002b), where a utopian kernel embedded within the intellectual project of Hayek and his followers (see Harvey, 2005) has been – not always exactly – translated into a multitude of policy visions, notably including Richard Florida's influential creative city (Peck, 2005).

Given that class remains an antagonistic social relation in critical theory, it is unsurprising that some, if certainly not all (see Slater, 2006), gentrification scholars have been critical of social mixing policy agendas in Europe and North America (see Lees, 2008, for a review). As Slater et al (2004) have argued, the term ‘gentrification’ refers ‘to nothing more or less than the class dimensions of neighbourhood change – in short, not simply changes in the housing stock, but changes in housing class’ (p 1144, emphasis in original). For most gentrification scholars, then, the analytical focus on pro-social mixing policy agendas has centred on socioeconomic dimensions (that is, not racial or ethno-cultural dimensions). In terms of the instruments used within these policy agendas, such a focus does not represent a problematic bracketing of the object (Zizek, 2006). For example, housing tenure requirements (that is, affordability requirements) have driven social mixing via socioeconomic characteristics, even if this inevitably carries other social dimensions. In addition, the spatial planning dimensions of the UK governments’ Urban Renaissance and Housing Renewal programmes have been premised on ‘rebalancing’ socioeconomic mix, via attracting the ‘respectable’ middle classes back to problematised (inner-city) neighbourhoods. For the most part, policy programmes have not been focused on rebalancing other modes of social difference, although various identity politics are certainly intertwined in neighbourhood change.