Resisting renovictions: tenants organizing against housing companies’ renewal practices in Sweden

Abstract

While governing practices, as articulated in policies and other documents intended to shape tenants’ behavior, have been given considerable attention in research, less attention has been given to the self-regulation of tenants in practice or how these governance practices are challenged and resisted from below. The ambition of our work is to study governing practices deployed by housing companies in two Swedish cities to achieve tenants’ compliance with extensive housing renewal plans, and to conceptualize this means of exerting power as practices through which tenants are governed, silenced and surveilled, and their collective interests divided. Building on several years of ethnographic work among communities of tenants experiencing extensive renovation of their homes and, in particular, qualitative interviews and focus-group interviews with tenants, this study analyzes how governing practices are exercised by housing companies and contested by tenants. Our contribution is twofold: First, we propose the broadening of the notion of repertoires of contention alongside collectively organized contention to include covert and individual forms of resistance. We understand these forms as mutually shaping, and distinguish between eight forms of resistance repertoires common among tenants facing renovictions (indirect evictions caused by extensive housing renewal and skyrocketing rents) in Sweden: building local identities, mixing formal and informal forms of organization, delaying the process, detournement, politics of disengagement, demanding accountability through visibility, reversing knowledge hierarchies, and reversed shaming. Second, we aim to add to the still understudied field of tenants’ mobilizations in the Swedish context.

Legal Geographies of Displacement through Renovation: Legal Interpretative Practices in Sweden

“…Previous reports show that the practice of Rent Tribunals in cases of renovation is biased, ruling on behalf of the property owners in 86% of cases or more, depending on the period and region (Baeten et al 2017;Polanska and Ax en 2021;Regeringskansliet 2017;Westin 2011). Although a small proportion of all renovation-related matters are decided in Rent Tribunals (for instance, 289 cases of approval/prohibition of improvement work in Stockholm in 2019), the knowledge on the practice there has wider implications and is used by landlords in convincing tenants to approve of the renovation (Baeten et al 2017;Polanska and Richard 2021), resulting in rent increases that "may be an indirect consequence of the tribunal's decision" (Bengtsson and Bohman 2020:370). How these biased decisions of the Rent Tribunal are articulated and justified will be elaborated in the next section.…”

“…How rental law is interpreted is a part of that force of reason that is assigned to the Rent Tribunals in Sweden, mediating in conflicts on renovation. Scholars have argued that the outcomes of the legal practice of Rent Tribunals have wider implications, as they are commonly being used by housing companies to frame the processes of renovation and influence concerned tenants (Bengtsson and Bohman 2020; Polanska and Axén 2021; Polanska and Richard 2021). In this study, I show how this is done in the legal practice of Rent Tribunals by naturalising consequences and shifting the responsibility for displacement, and through abstraction that de‐contextualises homes as assets for the property owners (Savini and Aalbers 2016).…”

“…Sweden is known for its universal housing policy along with what Kemeny (2006) called an integrated rental market motivated by the formula of "good housing for all". However, researchers have been reporting for a decade now on gentrification and low-income filtering (Hedin et al 2012), tenure inequality (Christophers 2021), housing inequality (Grander 2023), increasing homelessness and poverty among single mothers (Samzelius 2020), gendered and racialised vulnerability in housing (Listerborn 2021), and displacement caused by extensive renovation of rental housing (Baeten et al 2017;Polanska and Richard 2021;Pull 2020).…”

“…In Sweden, Rent Tribunals are assigned to mediate in conflicts between property owners and tenants. They are intermediaries in a context of housing financialisation driving the changes in the rental housing market and spurring the growing trend of "renovictions" in the country (Baeten et al 2017;Polanska and Richard 2021;Pull 2020). Renovictions, or displacing tenants through extensive renovation of housing property, accurately illustrate the monstrosity of the contemporary Swedish housing system (Christophers 2013), but have not yet been studied from the perspective of legal institutions and their role in restricting and enabling financialisation of rental housing.…”

“…2012), tenure inequality (Christophers 2021), housing inequality (Grander 2023), increasing homelessness and poverty among single mothers (Samzelius 2020), gendered and racialised vulnerability in housing (Listerborn 2021), and displacement caused by extensive renovation of rental housing (Baeten et al. 2017; Polanska and Richard 2021; Pull 2020).…”