Embryonic alternatives amid London's housing crisis

Abstract

One of the hallmarks of the austerity agenda in the UK has been the discursive prevalence of both scarcity and individual responsibility as justifications for drastic cuts to public services. In the context of London's housing crisis, cuts to welfare for low‐income tenants have resulted in an alarming rise in evictions and homelessness within a wider context of displacement and gentrification in the city. This article explores how embryonic resistance to these processes, as well as to deeper histories of dispossession, is undertaken by housing activists through a set of ethical practices that promote collectivized care and mutual support among those faced with housing precarity. Although these emergent networks are fragile, it argues that a nascent housing movement in London offers some compelling glimpses of a more hopeful politics that may lie just beneath the surface of the present moment.

From eviction to evicting: Rethinking the technologies, lives and power sustaining displacement

“…An examination of the working lives of county court bailiffs who are responsible for enforcing evictions under English law reveals three key processes which shape eviction enforcement: the routine and rhythms of eviction work, the political technologies of eviction that combine material and emotional coercion, and the role of eviction resistance at both a large and small scale in enacting and reshaping them (Baker, 2017: 162). As a localised case study of an eviction resistance in London reveals, when encounters between these professionals and organised forms of eviction resistance take place, the process of negotiation between bailiff and eviction resister reveals clashing moral frameworks around the meaning of home (Wilde, 2017). Comparable agencies for the enforcement of legal documents and acts of repossession are found across Europe in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany (Stenberg et al, 2011).…”

Resisting the rentier city: Grassroots housing activism and renter subjectivity in post-crisis London

“…Over the past decade, activists, scholars and activist-scholars have documented the quotidian struggles of those who find themselves subject to displacement, dispossession or endemic housing insecurity in a wide range of contexts. Such work has highlighted the underlying shifts in political economy that produce housing precarity (Fields & Hodkinson, 2018;Palomera, 2014;Madden & Marcuse, 2016), explored the macro-and micro-politics of foreclosures and evictions (Desmond, 2016;Purser, 2016;Sullivan, 2014Sullivan, , 2017, examined the shifting makings and unmakings of 'home' amid processes of dispossession (Baxter & Brickell, 2014;Nowicki, 2014), and documented the novel forms of resistance that have emerged among those who struggle to defend their homes in a variety of different locations (Álvarez de Andrés, Zapata Campos & Zapata, 2015; European Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City, 2017; Lancione, 2017Lancione, , 2019Wilde, 2017aWilde, , 2017bZhang, 2004). Yet despite this welcome attention to the ways in which housing precarity is both constituted and experienced in political terms, to date there has been less consideration of what may prove to be an equally significant development: the re-emergence of the renter as a political subject.…”