Protest, Property and the Commons

Finchett-Maddock, Lucy

doi:10.4324/9780203798133

Cited by 15 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Indeed, this creation of the other is a central operation of securitisation, with its most familiar example as the ‘terrorist’. This demonisation of the squatter as ‘Other’ has been talked of by other writers (Dadusc and Dee, 2013; Finchett-Maddock, 2011). With Securitisation of Property Squatting in Europe , this phenomenology of the outside-inside, the impure, unwanted and the miscreant is further mythologised through a compelling use of ‘liminality’ (which is a familiar description when considering the relationship of law with resistance in critical legal studies): ‘The squatter can be viewed as a type of liminal individual who resides in the interstices of society where he is often uncounted and unsurveilled, sharing an identity here with other types of uncounted and ill-defined individuals, such as terrorists’.…”

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confidence: 67%

Book review: Securitisation of Property Squatting in Europe

Finchett-Maddock

2014

Urban Studies

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The authors provide an extremely balanced treatment, dividing the text into eight chronological periods. With the rise in highly visible family poverty and homelessness since the 1970s, they might have usefully spent more time analysing the latter period, their treatment of which seems rushed. The overall narrative also seems a little disjointed at times, in part because it is divided into numerous subsections, some of which are quite short.More significantly, the authors' tight focus on New York City sparks questions that remain unanswered. How did New York's treatment of poor families compare with that of other major American cities? Even within New York, to what extent did various statelevel concerns influence developments at the city level? The intriguing way in which the authors have framed their topic also prompts related questions that lie outside the scope of their project. How have New York's poor children fared in terms of educational attainment? New York occupies such a large place in the American imagination -was or is socioeconomic mobility any more possible for impoverished youth than in other states? Future historians of New York will hopefully pursue such lines of inquiry.Nunez and Sribnick have supplemented the narrative with 100 powerful illustrations, including both useful maps and poignant photographs that remind the reader of the millions of people whose stories the authors tell. This is a fine piece of scholarship that will draw interest from not only experts on homelessness and poverty policy, but also from those interested in urban history, childhood development and gender studies.

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confidence: 67%

Book review: Securitisation of Property Squatting in Europe

Finchett-Maddock

2014

Urban Studies

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“…This can be seen for example through the advent of ‘pop-up’ culture whereby temporary, interstitial leisure services such as bars, shops and event spaces are credited with re-animating urban high streets and embedding a cache of cool in recession-hit inner-city neighbourhoods (Harris, 2015, 2020). This has distinct parallels with squatted social centres and other radical, community-led methods of repurposing vacant sites (Finchett-Maddock, 2016a; O’Callaghan and Lawton, 2016). And yet, as with the previous examples, these social justice imaginaries are re-narrativised as commercial projects.…”

Section: Appropriating the Enemy: Commodifying The Anti-capitalist Homementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In response, the soon-to-be evicted group began protesting regularly outside Newham Council’s offices. The group gained widespread media coverage and public empathy, eventually being rehoused in-borough by the local authority (Finchett-Maddock, 2016b; Watt, 2016). In the wake of this victory, Focus E15 became involved in housing activism more broadly, and became ubiquitous in the struggle against gentrification and displacement in East London and beyond, running a weekly street stall and organising protests, public meetings and other grassroots modes of resistance.…”

Section: “I See Myself As More Of An Occupier”: Re-appropriation As Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

Is anyone home? Appropriating and re-narrativisating the post-criminalisation squatting scene in England and Wales

Nowicki

2020

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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This paper explores the political significance of narratives of home. Using the aftermath of the 2012 criminalisation of squatting in England and Wales as a case study, the paper traces the ways in which the concept of ‘home’ is deployed to both reinforce neoliberal ideals, and is utilised as a tool of resistance by squatters. This paper focuses on the ways in which particular narratives of home are utilised to shape and legitimise housing policy and legislation such as the criminalisation of squatting through moralising language that delegitimise anti-capitalist homes as ‘nonhomes’. Following this, the paper goes on to explore how tropes and aesthetics of squatting are appropriated, re-narrativised and commercialised by neoliberal stakeholders. The remainder of the paper focuses on the methods by which squatters and other housing activists, too, utilise re-narrativisation tactics. Firstly, I highlight instances in which squatters have subverted assumptions of squats as ‘non-homes’ in order to make themselves invisible, and thus safe, in the urban landscape. Secondly, I explore linguistic methods utilised by squatters as a means of disassociating themselves from negative connotations through re-framing elements of the practice as ‘occupation’. The paper concludes by calling for closer attention to be paid to the political potency of the homespace, and the ways in which narratives of home can be utilised in the pursuit of social justice and anti-capitalist housing models.

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“…The provision of kraakwatch (or anti-kraak) as a response to an imagined threat of unlawful occupation finds echoes in the English context, where the threat of squatting is often greatly exaggerated by PG companies 17 when compared to even the most optimistic estimates. 18 Nonetheless, the unusual locations and living conditions of guardians are so evocative of countercultural appropriations of vacant spaces that PG is known among guardians as well as in common parlance as 'licensed'…”

Section: Property Guardianship: Between Squatting and Anti-squattingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-precarization and the spatial imaginaries of property guardianship

Ferreri

Dawson

2017

cultural geographies

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Property guardianship, a form of short-term building security through temporary dwelling, has emerged in several European countries over the last twenty years. Despite being characterised by tenure insecurity and often substandard conditions, 'living as a guardian' has become a composite and polyvalent mode of inhabiting cities, rooted in the production and dissemination of distinctive spatial imaginaries of 'nomadic' urban dwelling. In the United Kingdom, where guardianship is relatively novel and marginal, the establishment of several intermediary companies has contributed to the rapid diffusion of the scheme as precarious 'adventurous' housing, particularly in metropolitan areas where guardianship schemes largely attract mobile and universityeducated individuals. Drawing on debates about the complexities of 'self-precarization' (Lorey, 2006), this article examines imaginaries of property guardianship and their ambivalent significance in relation to lived processes of precarization. Through the analysis of media representations and in-depth interviews with current and former guardians in London, it explores how guardians mobilise narratives of adaptability, flexibility and nomadism, between resignation to existing housing conditions and a sense of critical and autonomous agency. The article proposes and develops a nuanced qualitative approach to analyse how precarious dwelling through guardianship is reshaping spatial imaginaries of acceptable and desirable urban dwelling, and contributing to significant processes of individual and collective subjectification. At a moment of extensive governmentality through insecurity, it concludes that examining imaginaries and practices of self-precarization offers a critical entry point for understanding and rethinking, theoretically and politically, housing precarity and its geographies.

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Protest, Property and the Commons

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

Book review: Securitisation of Property Squatting in Europe

Book review: Securitisation of Property Squatting in Europe

Is anyone home? Appropriating and re-narrativisating the post-criminalisation squatting scene in England and Wales

Self-precarization and the spatial imaginaries of property guardianship

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