Ambivalent Decay: Regeneration anxieties in east London

This essay explores the relationship between infrastructural anxiety and political agency amid urban regeneration in Poplar, in east London’s former docklands. It does so through reflections on multimodal ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2019 alongside Jimmy – a self-identifying white, working-class man in his early 60s and long-term resident of a social housing estate undergoing redevelopment. Jimmy experiences clinically diagnosed and sometimes debilitating anxiety. This has many causes and triggers, but the ongoing regeneration of his estate is a particular cause of concern and distress. He is anxious about the future, amid the uncertainties of regeneration and what it will mean for him. But equally, Jimmy is preoccupied with the past. Infrastructural anxiety here is not the same as the “displacement anxiety” discussed in gentrification literatures, whereby the uncertain prospect of an imminent, forced move effect a psychological toll (Watt 2021). Rather it stems from how contemporary gentrification aggravates and brings to the surface an earlier, unresolved loss. In this essay I try to make sense of these affective dynamics with particular attention to the inequalities of class and race long structuring urban change in this part of east London. But also, through text and images emerging from our multimodal research collaboration, I convey something of Jimmy’s agency vis-à-vis anxiety (Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón 2019). Rather than only a symptom of structural inequality, how might infrastructural anxiety be grasped as “a desire or life force trapped and twisted at an impasse, awaiting a chance to break through” (Biehl and Locke 2010: 332))?