An exhibition in South London demonstrates the struggle of residents against social cleansing.

Aysen Dennis lives on the eighth floor of the Aylesbury housing estate in the Southwark neighborhood of South London. Their apartment is accessed by a steep climb littered with garbage. Puddles form in the stairwell on the uneven surface. When you finally reach her hallway, it's deserted. The neighboring apartments are boarded up with thick metal panels, with old door numbers burned into the rusting surfaces.

"There are only five people left on my floor," Dennis says. "The rest of them are all gone."

In 2005, Southwark Council announced that it was going to demolish the housing estate - one of the largest in Europe - as part of a wider project to "transform" the area. At the time, this tangled mass of concrete blocks, built between 1967 and 1977, was home to around 7,500 residents. Today, it is largely empty. Since 2010, residents have been gradually relocated as Aylesbury is demolished block by block. Over the years, as political enthusiasm for post-war social housing projects waned, housing estates like Aylesbury, and others like it, fell into disrepair. The death sentence was perhaps foreseeable in 1997 when Tony Blair used the site for his Prime Ministerial inaugural speech, launching a policy of regenerating Britain's "new neighborhoods without hope" and "forgotten people" for New Labour.

According to Dennis, the complex's decline was not due to poor design or the neglect of its residents. She believes it is a victim of "managed decline" - deliberate abandonment - that serves the interests of development companies in the name of profit.

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Outside Aylesbury stretches vast green spaces, a luxury for Zone 1 London. The tower blocks overlook lawned areas and border Burgess Park, a landmark of which Dennis is well aware.

"This is my home," says a 64-year-old woman who has been a council tenant in the complex for 30 years and wants to stay. "They don't think people like me deserve to live here."

Dennis' block will be the next to be demolished. Walking down the hallway of the doomed building, her house is hard to miss. Daylight seeps in through the ajar door, rocking the darkness. Inside is bustling and brightly colored. The sunny one-bedroom apartment has been transformed into an exhibition, "Fight4Aylesbury," open April 14-23, documenting the lives and resistance of the people who live here.

"It's a celebration of our struggle," Dennis explains. The exhibition reimagines demolition, highlighting what residents and housing representatives see as a deeply flawed process. Southwark calls it "regeneration", Dennis calls it social cleansing.

As the plans progress, which are expected to be completed in 2036, residents have been scattered across the capital and even further afield. Of the 4,200 new homes being built on the site in partnership with Notting Hill Genesis Housing Association, the council says 1,575 (37.5%) will be social or council housing. This represents a loss of more than 800 homes: 87% of the 2,758 homes in Aylesbury were socially rented in 2008, according to a 2015 report from Greater London Authority. Residents who own apartments in the complex have in turn been forced to sell their homes at a price set by the council.

What is happening in Aylesbury is being repeated across London: people on low incomes are being forced out of their homes to make way for more expensive housing. The exhibition focuses on their experiences. Along the walls of the entrance to the apartment hang documents and newspaper clippings that tell us that 73% of residents voted against proposals to sell the complex in 2001.

Dennis has dedicated her bedroom to telling her story. It is the story of creating a home with her sister, with whom she left Turkey after the 1980 military coup, to live in uncertainty and loss for over 20 years, until deadlines stretched and her house began to crumble. Out the window, towering and skeletal on the London skyline, the cranes are actively working on the first phase of the renovation where she will move in by the end of the year. For Dennis, losing her home can't be underestimated. "It's always on my mind." For Dennis, anger and rage are essential for survival. But so is laughter. Among the artifacts of the struggle, she herself is a living archive - a rich history of life in the compound, ready to serve visitors along with endless cups of Turkish tea.

In the heart of the exhibit, she relaxes on a purple couch, arms spread out, a cigarette at the edge of her fingers. Her face is serious, but there is a mischievous sparkle in her dark eyes, and smile lines make their way down her cheeks. She talks about a time when the elevator was always running, people coming and going. When they sat on the hallways to keep cool in the summer heat, chatting with neighbors and children playing. "People were even dyeing their hair." Through videos from the complex's heyday and photos of Dennis' life - her two cats, her recently deceased sister and friends - we are reminded that this was a place for joy. That's why Dennis wanted to hold the exhibit in her apartment. "I want everyone to come and see it from the inside," she says. "Everyone is always looking from the outside and making assumptions."

For many years Aylesbury was inglorious, used as a symbol of urban crime and poverty. But when you walk into Dennis House, all that is forgotten. The exhibition transports us, allowing us to see the beauty in these ruins and giving room for a rare politics of hope.

By the time of publication, Southwark Council had not responded to openDemocracy's request.

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