Self-Build Festival for Community Empowerement

UCLs proposal in Stratford displays every hall mark of Neoliberal urbanism; spurred on by public sector leveraging, financed through debt and driven solely by the desire to create sites of capital accumulation. Discourse from residents demonstrates the lack of any consultation, democracy or community participation in the scheme, instead being subjected to imposition and patronisation in a process that unstopped, will ultimately end in the total erasure of theirtheir community and its history, displacing its class-based subjectivities. It is clear that UCL is an agent of gentrification; UCL Stratford represents an act of accumulation by dispossession, a scheme proposed not for the benefit of existing communities but the continued valorisation of capital. As the abstractions of UCLs financial modelling and LBNs statistical analysis clash against the lived reality of the Carpenters residents being forced from their homes,homes, the unadulterated violence of debt and financialisation is brought manifestly into the open in a disgusting and brutal schism

between Capital and people.

The Imaginary Festival, Carpenters Estate