Everyday Life in the Gentrifying City

On Displacement, Ethnic Privileging and the Right to Stay Put

Tone Huse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138600157
• eBook ISBN: 9781317138396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Oslo, Everyday Life in the Gentrifying City offers an examination of gentrification from below, exploring the effects of this process upon city neighbourhoods and those that inhabit them, whether residents, business owners and their customers, or local activists. Engaging with recent debates surrounding immigration and the inclusion of ethnic minorities in the city, the book takes up the question of ethnicity and gentrification. It argues for an urban policy that gives up the preoccupation with policies concerning the residential mix and place transformation in favour of empowering its citizens. A lively and engaging analysis, in which theoretical rigour is illuminated with rich interviews and empirical content in order to shed light on the relationship between gentrification, displacement, and integration, Everyday Life in the Gentrifying City will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, geography, anthropology and urban studies.

Chapter 1
Renewal and Eviction

Figure 1 Treffen Café

‘You could come to Lompa on a Saturday morning and be lucky to find a place to sit. There was room for a good 4–500 people,’ Kjell states.¹ Lompa – or Olympen as is its formal name– is a live music restaurant that opened its doors to the public in 1892. A legend of the east side, it has been the scene of many a lively night.

‘Yeah, sometimes it was filled to the rafters mid-week, too,’ Øyvind adds.

‘It was packed,’ Kjell affirms. ‘And the grand old lady sat by the door, up on a barstool, supporting herself on a huge cane because her legs were bad. If somebody showed up who she felt was a bit too “juiced”, she wouldn’t let them in.’

Øyvind chuckles: ‘If you didn’t get in, you were banned for nine and ninety years, but then if you came back again a week later she’d let you in.’

Kjell is a skilled manual worker by trade. Up until 1980, he moved around a lot, but has since then lived in Old Oslo, for the last 18 years on Tøyen Street. Øyvind does not live in the neighbourhood, but comes by often to visit. He works, as he puts it, ‘in filth’.

‘Cleaning,’ Kjell explains.

For both of them, the Treffen Café at 39 Tøyen Street is one of their most important meeting places. Kjell and Øyvind’s group are Treffen’s regulars, and they meet more or less on a daily basis, for a couple of hours. Some drink beer; others have a Coke or a cup of coffee. Most of them live just a stone’s throw away, many in the old Gråbein buildings across the street. They introduce themselves as working-class people. Their sense of belonging to Oslo’s east side is strong, their memories and experiences abound. Around the group’s regular table, a story is often concluded with the phrase ‘Yup, that’s how it was in the old days.’ Or ‘Yeah, that was back when …’ someone will say, and a new story begins. Here local history is woven together with the lives lived in the community, the people with the history. And in this, Lompa is a key symbol of what Old Oslo once was and of what it is now becoming.

According to the regulars at Treffen, Lompa’s days of glory came to an end when its ownership changed hands in 1992. The new owners made few changes to the interior and the menu, but they ran the place differently. In the course of six months, people stopped coming –‘4–500 people’. None of Treffen’s regulars know what happened to them. Now the place is under renovation. The large paintings on its walls will be restored and a new interior installed. Some of the original furniture has been taken to the Oslo Museum on the city’s west side. At Treffen, they doubt that the new Lompa will be something for them.

‘The atmosphere is important at a place like Lompa,’ Kjell explains. ‘All of this, what other people call “seedy”, it’s not seedy at all. They have no idea what it is.’

Lompa had a unique atmosphere, he claims. And it had clientele all its own, with a lot of different kinds of people.

‘Now they’re going to create a modern Lompa, and it won’t work,’ he states. ‘Lompa was an institution. Now it’s just gone, simple as that.’

Although not in any sense as legendary as Lompa, Treffen is also a place where you can find what Kjell describes as ‘all kinds of people’. This Thursday afternoon in May, however, it is quite deserted. A solitary carpenter from eastern Europe sits at one of the window tables and behind the bar is one of the men who run the place. His hands are bejewelled with several large, gold rings, and around his neck hang a corresponding number of necklaces. The place closed for a while for renovations, Kjell tells me. When it reopened, they were invited to the inauguration party. Pakistani food was served, recipes shared.

‘I guess you could say that we owned the place,’ he laughs.

A few years ago, their regular table was larger, and especially on Fridays there were many patrons. It was on one such night that Kjell met his wife, whom he married in 2001.

‘It’s in places like this that you meet people,’ he confirms.

There was plenty of elbow room and all kinds of discussions, about everything from fishing expeditions to drinking binges – parties and fun – to more serious topics.

‘History, politics, literature’, Kjell explains. ‘What you call serious is a matter of opinion, but it was never boring. I miss our discussions. Maybe sometimes they were kind of ironic, a little teasing. But there was actually a serious idea behind them.’

Urban Renewal Ltd

As first-hand witnesses to how Grønland-Tøyen has developed, Tøyen Street’s long-term residents possess a unique knowledge about how gentrification has changed the area. They lived here when it was perceived as a slum, and they lived here when the ‘ghetto’ label was introduced. They have witnessed an extensive physical upgrading and they have seen a new kind of resident move in: people who are viewed as enhancing the local community, their social status being higher than that of the friends and neighbours lost. I did manage to track down some of these ‘lost’ people, but never got past having a phone conversation with them. To speak about ‘what happened’, as many put it, requires them to revisit times that are better left forgotten. Most were quite old and had no desire or, as some stated, no strength to speak about ‘it’. What they were all referring to is a housing rehabilitation programme that remaining long-term residents also unequivocally identify as the origin of the changes that continue to unfold today: ‘the urban renewal’.

Initiated in 1979, the urban renewal programme was designed to improve housing standards in inner-city Oslo. The municipality had neglected to implement measures for full redevelopment, or what was often referred to as the ‘sanitising’ of the inner city, since before the Second World War. Large segments of the inner-city districts had deteriorated into what the authorities now perceived as slums (Anon. 2007). Unimplemented redevelopment resolutions from 1938 and 1939 had, on the other hand, been used by landlords as an excuse for the lack of maintenance. The Gråbein buildings on Tøyen Street were among those in the worst state. In his memoirs about growing up here in the interwar years, Karl Forthun describes how perceptions of its residents’ drunkenness, crime and filth had earned the poverty-ridden buildings the nickname ‘Kristiania’s social dustbin’. Large families lived in tiny flats, maintenance was deplorable and the cockroaches flourished. ‘The days when the big latrines were emptied were red letter days,’ Forthun writes (1987: 14, my translation). ‘The stench was virtually intolerable. Some people were bedridden for days afterwards and everyone felt unwell.’

After the Second World War, Oslo was, much like Glass’s (1964) London, booming. Norway was undergoing urbanisation and the population was growing rapidly. Housing policy focused on the outer districts, where farmland was appropriated to build high rises and apartment blocks typical of suburban satellite towns (Brattbakk and Hansen 2004). Many of those who were able left the run-down inner city for modern apartments and greener surroundings. Old Oslo was not only derelict; it was also heavily polluted by road traffic. And while there were discussions in the 1960s about how to alleviate inner-city decline, it was not until 1974 that the executive committee of the City Council² voted to establish an urban renewal company to deal with rehabilitation (Sørvoll 2009). Oslo was at the time run by the Labour Party, which envisaged a renewal company owned by the municipality that would satisfy the social democratic housing movement’s ideals. Important aims were to avoid property speculation in renewal projects, to ensure democratic control over the renewal process, to ensure that working-class people could afford to live in the renewed areas, and to change the ownership structure – away from exploitative landlords and towards housing cooperatives.³

The Labour Party’s vision was never realised, as local elections in 1975 brought the right-wing Conservative Party into power. The party furthest to the right, known today as the Progress Party, argued for minimal public involvement. A compromise was instead reached between the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. The compromise allowed for private companies and organisations to enter as owners of the renewal company, but also stated that the municipality should play a key role. Then, in 1976, the Norwegian Parliament passed an urban renewal act (Ruud 2003),⁴ which allowed for the execution of urban renewal by private stakeholders (Sæter and Ruud 2005: 66) and thus provided the necessary regulatory framework for the compromise on a public-private renewal company. The act also gave cities the authority to pass so-called ‘renewal measures’, which meant that the municipality could acquire all of the properties in a given area. At the same time, it would assume responsibility for renovating or upgrading existing buildings. Following up on this in 1977 and 1978, the authorities in Oslo produced a renewal programme guideline and the urban planning office began to evaluate the condition of homes in the inner city. As a result of this process, almost 10,000 dwellings were renovated between 1979 and 1993, the majority under the auspices of the limited company Oslo Byfornyelse A/S (‘Oslo Urban Renewal Ltd’) (Sæter and Ruud 2005: 66). Among the largest shareholders of this company were Oslo Municipality, UNI and ABC Bank (Sørvoll 2009). Medium-sized shareholders were OBOS and USBL – member-owned, cooperative housing associations set up in 1929 and 1948, respectively, to build and provide housing for Oslo residents (OBOS) and youth (USBL). In short, rather different stakeholders thus came to own the renewal company than those originally envisioned. Oslo Byfornyelse A/S became the primary stakeholder in the city’s programme for urban renewal, while the smaller company Grønland Byfornyelse A/S was established for the purpose of renovating two blocks in Grønland (Anon. 2007, Sørvoll 2009). The renovation of the Gråbein buildings, however, was carried out by Oslo Byfornyelse A/S. When the residents now speak of ‘the urban renewal’, they refer to the overall activities of this company – and not the municipality, renewal-related resolutions, or the act itself.

The tasks to be carried out by Oslo Byfornyelse A/S were comprehensive. The company was to acquire properties that were ripe for redevelopment and renovation, to organise the relocation of residents from buildings to be renovated or demolished, to plan and administer renovation measures, and to assist the municipality in related renovation and redevelopment matters (Anon. 1973, Sørvoll 2009). At the time of the establishment of Oslo Byfornyelse A/S in 1978, the company was promised ‘broad-reaching mandates’ (Anon. 1977), and with continuous monitoring from the time of a property’s acquisition to the completed building, the company could virtually be considered an administrative conglomerate. Its mandate was to carry out the municipality’s ambitious project: to replace the unacceptable ‘slum’ conditions in the centre of the capital city with a modernised and presentable inner city that would appeal to what the City Council had defined as a ‘versatile population’ (Sæter and Ruud 2005: 67).

The Oslo City Council further determined that the renovation would be self-financing; the renewal companies’ incomes were to be based on the sales of renovated dwellings and not on public subsidies (Sørvoll 2009). The majority of the buildings acquired by Oslo Byfornyelse A/S were blocks of flats where all residents were tenants. As a rule, the material standard was low, as was the rent. When the company took over, the residents were usually given two options: They could be given a replacement rental flat somewhere else or they could buy a renovated flat, usually in the building where they had previously been tenants. The urban renewal buildings were as a rule organised as housing cooperatives, where the residents bore the renovation costs.

In 1982, a resolution was passed on renewal of the area where Tøyen Street is located (Ruud 2003: 51), and the Gråbein buildings were targeted as one of the most important projects. The ‘social dustbin’ was now to become family-friendly – an ambition which implied enormous challenges – because contrary to later measures that were actually aimed at promoting gentrification (Sæter 2005), the urban renewal initially entailed a two-fold objective. On the one hand, Oslo’s east side was to be made attractive to ‘people who wish to channel their consumption towards a higher housing standard’ (Urban Renewal Programme of 18 April 1977, cited in Ruud 2003: 50, my translation). On the other hand, the protection of residents who would not be able to afford a price-hike was important. Different funding schemes and legal rights were to ensure that the urban renewal did not drive them from one renewal area to the next (Ruud 2003: 50). Oslo Byfornyelse A/S was thus faced with a somewhat contradictory task. It was also to find solutions for a relatively challenging endeavour, in that the buildings in the city centre, many from the building boom of the late nineteenth century, were extremely derelict (Anon. 2007).

‘Grotesque conditions’

The housing problems in Old Oslo were closely linked to large-scale social inequality (Kjelman 1982, Christiansen 1991). The winter months, when temperatures in Oslo can drop to –20º C, could be particularly demanding, as described in an article from the newspaper Arbeiderbladet of February 1980 (Anon. 1980). Under the headline ‘Grotesque suffering from the cold in Tøyen-Grønland’, the newspaper presented the results of the survey Kald Vinter (‘Cold Winter’). Twelve students from the Norwegian School of Municipal Studies and Social Science, along with three members of the Grønland-Lower Tøyen Residents Association had at the time visited a total of 90 homes in the course of one day. Their aim was to map out how the winter affected living conditions in the area.

The conditions they encountered were shocking: In more than half of the flats, the living-room temperature was below 18 degrees, and in half of them, the water pipes had frozen on one or more occasion in the course of the winter (Riiser and Kjelman 1982). One-fifth of the tenants also reported that because of the cold they were forced to either stay in bed or leave the flat. In a number of flats, the entire family sat together in one room to stay warm, and in four out of five homes, the electrical system was so decrepit that the residents had to turn off the heat to cook or use the washing machine. ‘In many of the flats the conditions were so grotesque that we had difficulties believing that such standards could exist in our welfare society,’ Assistant Professor Bjørn Riiser stated (Anon. 1980, my translation). ‘Unfortunately, it looks as if the public authorities are both powerless and remiss when it comes to ensuring that the building owners improve the living conditions.’

Along with Arbeiderbladet, a number of other national newspapers and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) also reported on the results of the Cold Winter survey.⁵ In less than a week, the matter was up before Oslo Municipality’s housing committee, in the Municipal Executive Board and the City Council. NOK 3.5 million was allocated to implement immediate measures and in the course of the year, a total of NOK 36 million was spent on the insulation of draughty flats, the heating of outhouses in the back gardens and new electrical circuits for the flats.

In 1982, a new report was released on the miserable housing conditions, this time from a research group headed by social worker Laila Kjelman (Anon. 1982a). The report describes the serious social problems among the population of Old Oslo, and ties the housing conditions to injustice and downright destitution. None the less, Kjelman found it necessary to counter-balance her report by emphasising that:

Those who live in this area have many times reacted to stories in the mass media that label the district as a slum and the residents as disadvantaged … This report is neither adequate with respect to the positive qualities that this area also possesses, and which are first and foremost related to the people who live there. Those of us who have come from the outside have experienced a solidarity, humour, strength and stamina that one would search far and wide to find the likes of elsewhere. The elderly who have lived here for a generation play a key role in this, with their knowledge of the past and the bonds established between them. But the younger generation has been just as enthusiastic in their work at improving the conditions of the neighbourhood. Elderly and young people have all donated large amounts of their spare time. Political differences are forgotten in this common pursuit. (Kjelman 1982: 100, my translation)

Residents Protest

The renovation of Old Oslo’s housing stock was long overdue. The conditions had to be improved. But even in the initial phase of the urban renewal, residents began to question the methods of the municipality and Oslo Byfornyelse A/S. Was it the district itself or the living conditions of the residents that was to be improved? The newspaper headlines from this time are characterised by scepticism about the changes that were to take place.

‘People are pleasant,’ researcher Anne Louise Gjesdal Christensen responded when Arbeiderbladet asked her whether the locals were fed up with ‘planners and renewers’ (Anon. 1982b, my translation). Like the group headed by Kjelman (1982), Christensen was also conducting research on the conditions surrounding the renewal project. ‘But,’ she continues, ‘many are pretty fed up. They have heard about so many plans for such a long time. And they don’t believe that anything is going to happen now either, so we are afraid that many will be caught off guard’ (Anon. 1982b, my translation).

When the renewal was then initiated, a lot of the public debate was focused on renovation versus demolition and building anew (Nærø 1982, Anon. 1983, Egeland 1983a, 1983b). Some of the residents considered the residential buildings to be so run-down that preservation was futile, while others took to the streets and demonstrated against decisions to tear down the buildings they were living in. Their greatest concern was that they would not be able to afford to move into the new buildings (Anon. 1983). ‘Shouldn’t people who have lived their entire lives in a building have the right to decide how they want things to be?’ resident activist Erna Nystein asked in the Norwegian national daily Aftenposten (Egeland 1983a, my translation).

Gentrification Warnings

Nystein’s concerns would soon prove to be well-founded, and reflected a series of problems between the local population and Oslo Byfornyelse A/S (Ruud 2003, Anon. 2007). Despite the fact that the residents bore the majority of the costs ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Translator’s Note
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Renewal and Eviction
• 2 Little Pakistan
• 3 The Win–Win Myth
• 4 Birds of a Feather Attend School Together?
• 5 The New Grønland
• 6 The Art Spectacle
• 7 Unrest and Fear
• 8 Minorities in the City
• 9 From Tøyen Street
• Bibliography
• Index