Southwark Notes were excited to run across the newly formed group Fight For Revite made up of young adults from Ark Academy school in North Southwark when we attended the last Community Council meeting in March. Fight for Revite were great at asking Stafford Lancaster, investment director at Delancey, some pointed questions about how viability assessments made by developers are often skewed to enable them to pretend they can’t provide 35% ‘affordable’ housing on a scheme.
The question of how regeneration and social cleansing affects young adults is rarely asked. As young people subject to all sorts top-down decisions being made about their community we thought it might be a good idea to both interview them and to give them some publicity.
How did you decide to come together as a group?
We came together for a project called UniteUS which is a competition run by the US embassy so we decided to come together because we all had similar views on the same social issues.
What does Fight for Revite want to do as a group?
-Increase awareness
-Advocate for more social housing
-Bring this up in Parliament
-Provide a platform for the youth and resident to be involved in the decision making process
How are you going to do this?
-We’ve sent emails to Jeremy Corbyn to arrange a meeting
-Attended community council meetings.
-Had a meeting with our principle Matt Jones
-Interviewed local traders and residents
-Gathered data
-Worked alongside Lend Lease
One of your concerns is about gentrification- How do you see and experience this?
One of our members, Saidur, used to live in the old Heygate Estate and saw first hand the effects of gentrification. Furthermore, we all live nearby and are witness to the construction projects around us.
Give them some support – follow them on Twitter and invite them to your local events. We want to thank them for answering our questions even though they were very stressed from exams in those weeks. It’s great to see more and more different groups forming in Southwark especially young people raising these critical questions to the Council and developers and also to pupils and teachers in their own school.
Southwark Notes - whose regeneration? 