Matthew Thompson

Innovation is perhaps the buzzword in local economic development policy. Associated narrowly with neoliberal ideas, conventional notions of innovation – like its capitalocentric counterparts, enterprise and entrepreneurialism – may promise higher productivity, global competitiveness and technological progress but do not fundamentally change the ‘rules of the game’. In contrast, an emerging field reimagines social innovation as disruptive change in social relations and institutional configurations. In this article, I explore the conceptual and political differences within this pre-paradigmatic field, and argue for a more transformative understanding of social innovation. Building on the work of David Graeber, I mobilise the novel constructs of ‘play’ and ‘games’ to advance our understanding of the contradictory process of institutionalising social innovation for urban transformation. This is illustrated through a case study of Liverpool, where diverse approaches to innovation are employed in attempts to resolve longstanding socioeconomic problems. Dominant market-/state-led economic development policies – what I call the ‘regeneration game’ – are contrasted with more experimental, creative, democratic and potentially more effective forms of social innovation, seeking urban change through playing with the rules of the game. I conclude by considering how the play-game dialectic illuminates and reframes the way transformative social innovation might be cultivated by urban policy, the contradictions entailed, and possible ways forward.

This article explores the historical development of two different
collaborative housing models: Liverpool’s housing co-operative
movement of the 1970s, when public tenants successfully struggled
for collective dweller control in designing, developing and managing
their own housing; and, today, Liverpool’s nascent urban
community land trust (CLT) movement. The genesis and institutionalization
of each is analysed through mobile urbanism, policy
mobilities and planning histories perspectives. Both Liverpool’s coops
and CLTs are shown to have been mobilized through ideas
adapted from elsewhere, mutating upon exposure to contextual
factors embedded in place. Contemporary CLT campaigns can be
traced back to various sources: CLT experiments by professional or
arms-length state agencies; and previous periods of collaborative
housing activism, notably the 1970s co-ops. The article situates
these movements within a collaborative housing conceptual framework
and draws out the implications of these genealogical findings
for the further development of collaborative housing.

Book chapter in 'From Conflict to Inclusion in Housing: Interaction of Communities, Residents and Activists'. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/from-conflict-to-inclusion-in-housing
Description from Editor's Introduction:
"Matthew Thompson’s ‘Contesting “dilapidated dwelling” ’ picks up on the work of Patrick Keiller, specifically his film The Dilapidated Dwelling, to discuss social and economic issues related to housing provision in the UK, with particular emphasis on Liverpool. Using Keiller as a springboard from which to explore the issues raised by art-led housing projects in Liverpool such as Homebaked, and less directly, the award-winning projects of Assemble at the Granby Four Streets, he weaves into the art discourse on housing the political underpinnings and conflicts that have existed for decades in this particular city. Referencing the writing of Henri Lefebvre in this artistic–political conceptualisation of housing, his chapter integrates many of the issues raised across the book, from the politics of housing to questions of finance, community and resident activism in conditions of contestation. As such, it is an ideal chapter with which to bring the volume to a close and through which to encourage continued crossdisciplinary engagements with the often conflictive issue of affordable housing provision and its community and social importance in the UK and internationally."

Earlier draft of book chapter in soon-to-be published The Routledge Handbook of Henri Lefebvre, the City and Urban Society.

This chapter explores how Logos and Eros – together representing an animating polarity in Lefebvre’s dialectical thought – infuse different perspectives on dwelling. Drawing on the fundamental insight of John FC Turner and Colin Ward – that dwelling is not simply a noun but also a verb – I show how Lefebvre shares many affinities with these anarchist writers, and outline two opposing approaches to housing, seen as either a fetishized product or a lived process. This is illustrated through an empirical case study of Liverpool’s post-war history of addressing housing deprivation, focusing on a comparison between the 1970s housing cooperative movement, influenced by the ideas of Ward and Turner, and the Militant Tendency’s municipal socialist project, which opposed and attempted to ‘municipalise’ the co-ops. Lastly, I consider what these divergent approaches might mean for Lefebvre’s utopian-socialist revolutionary concern with constructing ‘experimental utopias’ that transcend the dichotomy between ends and means, between spatial closure and temporal openness.

Building on recent critical contributions towards conceptualising neighbourhood change as socially produced and politically 'performed', this article takes a closer look at the work of Henri Lefebvre to understand the (social) production of urban space as a deeply political process. A common critical characterisation of neighbourhood change occurring through a grand Lefebvrean struggle between 'abstract space-makers' and 'social space-makers' is critically examined through an in-depth historical case study of the Granby neighbourhood in Liverpool. Here, these forces are embodied respectively in technocratic state-led comprehensive redevelopment, notably Housing Market Renewal and its LIFE and ZOO zoning models; and in alternative community-led rehabilitation projects such as the Turner Prize-winning Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust. By tracing the surprisingly intimate interactions and multiple contradictions between these apparently opposing spatial projects, the production of neighbourhood is shown to be a complex, often violent political process, whose historical trajectories require disentangling in order to understand how we might construct better urban futures.

Article in Town & Country Planning vol. 85 no. 6 (http://www.tcpa.org.uk/pages/our-journal.html)
What the award of the Turner Prize to a community housing project for the first time says about Britain's housing crisis - and how lessons from Liverpool's history of housing alternatives might inform urban policy

Emerging in the cracks of the ownership model are alternatives to state/market provision of affordable housing and public/private-led regeneration of declining urban neighbourhoods, centred on commoning and collective dweller control. This paper explores how the community land trust model can become an effective institutional solution to urban decline in the context of private property relations. It explores a case study of a CLT campaign in Granby, a particularly deprived inner-city neighbourhood in Liverpool, England. The campaign seeks to collectively acquire empty homes under conditions of austerity, which have opened up the space for grassroots experimentation with guerrilla gardening, proving important for the campaign in gaining political trust and financial support. This paper discusses the potential of the CLT model as a vehicle for democratic stewardship of place and unpacks the contradictions threatening to undermine its political legitimacy.

Unpublished Masters dissertation written in summer 2011, for MSc Spatial Planning, which attempts to explore the 'neighbourhood effects' and 'mixed communities' debates of the time through a single case study of Greenwich Millennium Village, London, one of New Labour's flagship 'sustainable communities'. Over-theorised and under-researched in terms of the policy itself, but may provide some useful insights into social mixing in a specific new build neighbourhood.