Precarious Lives

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence This ground breaking book presents the first evidence of forced labour among displaced migrants who seek refuge in the UK. Through a critical engagement with contemporary debates about precarity, unfreedom and socio-legal status, the book explores how asylum and forced labour are linked, and enmeshed in a broader picture of modern slavery produced through globalised working conditions. Drawing on original evidence generated in fieldwork with refugees and asylum seekers, this is important reading for students and academics in social policy, social geography, sociology, politics, refugee, labour and migration studies, and policy makers and practitioners working to support migrants and tackle forced labour

Re-tracing the rise of institutional investor landlords in London and Milan through the lens of state de-risking

Research on housing financialisation in North America and Europe has explored the growing role of institutional investors such as pension funds and sovereign wealth funds as both funders and owners of residential housing. Several investment waves and different entry points have been identified, from opportunistic acquisitions related to early public housing privatisations in Northern Europe, the predatory grabbing of distressed assets in the United States and Europe following the global financial crisis, to the more recent long-term corporate landlordism under ‘financialisation 2.0’. Following recent scholarship on the essential de-risking role of the state in this process, this article compares the rise of institutional investment in different Build-to-Rent sectors of London and Milan to bring new insights on the role of the state in de-risking urban space through ‘mega-event urbanism’. We show how the exceptional state intervention involved in making the London 2012 Olympics and the 2015 Milan Expo worked hand-in-glove with long-term neoliberal path dependencies and the global financial crisis to de-risk institutional investment in local rental markets and boost new asset class formation

Council housing: Time to invest (now, more than ever), submission of evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Group for Council Housing

In 2010, the Parliamentary Council Housing Group of MPs and Defend Council Housing (DCH) published “Council Housing: Time to Invest, fair funding, investment and building council housing”. It was the result of an Inquiry that took evidence from tenants, councillors and others, and combined this in a thoroughly researched analysis of existing government policy, concluding that direct investment in council housing, accountably managed and maintained, was essential to produce and maintain the genuinely affordable and secure homes we have and need. But the 2012 ‘self-financing’ regime which promised new financial resources for Council housing, has not delivered. Councils have attempted to find alternative sources of much-needed investment, looking to Special Purpose Vehicles, Joint Ventures and Local Housing Companies. These have not brought solutions to the scale of the UK’s housing crisis, which continues to deepen. A lot has changed since 2010, and the pressures on council housing have only increased. Grenfell is a deadly symptom of what has gone wrong with UK housing policy. And the false economy of current policy is illustrated by the billions of pounds councils are having to spend on temporary accommodation. We are therefore glad to help in updating research to assess the current situation and the different investment strategies offered as an alternative to direct investment. MPs will be calling for evidence, and discussing these issues, with tenants, campaigners, trade unions and councillors around the country. This paper is intended as a starting point for that discussion, outlining relevant past and current policies and assessing what we know about their effectiveness and possible consequences

Precarious Lives : Refugees and Asylum Seekers’ Resistance within Unfree Labouring

This paper is concerned with the interplay between vulnerability, resistance and agency for forced migrants. Such concepts are yoked together as soon as the vulnerability inherent in the life-worlds of many migrants is seen to align not solely with victimhood, but also potentially to act as a springboard for agentic resistance, mobilisation and activism. As such, this paper is oriented towards a critical theoretical, and empirically insightful, engagement with the concept of resistance. Most particularly, we ponder the possibilities for resistance in situations of subjugated unfreedom within realms of forced labour. The backdrop for this paper is a broader research project that aims to gain an in-depth understanding of the experiences of severe labour exploitation and unfree labour among asylum seekers and refugees living in the UK (see http://precariouslives.org.uk/). The lives of many refugees and asylum seekers are widely recognised as characterised by poverty, social exclusion and destitution (Crawley 2001; Phillips 2006), yet there is little research documenting their experiences of exploitation and unfree labour and the reasons why they may be engaged in it. It was such a research gap that spurred our broader project, together with concern that government policy is potentially influential in propelling asylum seekers and refugees into severely exploitative working conditions including unfree elements (see fuller discussion in Lewis et al 2014a). This paper homes in on the particular issue of whether, and how, resistance may manifest for asylum seekers and refugees in landscapes of extreme labour precarity

Performing Expertise in Building Regulation: ‘Codespeak’ and Fire Safety Experts

Fire safety expertise was in great demand following the Grenfell Tower fire in London in June 2017. The government established a review of building regulations and an expert panel to inform its responses to Grenfell, and many other relevant organisations also formed their own expert panels. However, expert knowledge in fire safety is a highly contested domain, with knowledge claims based on differing sources. Fire fighters can claim expertise based on their experience of fighting fires, scientists and science-based engineers can claim expertise from experimentation, and those who create and enact regulations can claim expertise in what can termed ’codespeak’—the language of regulation. Although distanced from fundamental empirical experience of fire, codespeak is powerful because of its relative clarity and certainty, and legal status. Building users also bring their own form of ‘local’ expertise—they have first-hand experience of the practicalities of the solutions wrought by the other experts. Policy-makers thus face many competing forms of expert advice on fire safety, and their ability to judge what is most relevant in any particular case rests on the existence of a sufficient range and depth of in-house government expertise

LIFE in a ZOO: Henri Lefebvre and the (social) production of (abstract) space in Liverpool

Building on recent critical contributions towards conceptualising neighbourhood change as socially produced and politically ‘performed’, this paper takes a closer look at the work of Henri Lefebvre to understand the production of urban space as a deeply political process. A common critical characterisation of neighbourhood change—occurring through a grand Lefebvrean struggle between ‘abstract space-makers’ and ‘social space-makers’—is critically examined through an in-depth historical case study of the Granby neighbourhood in Liverpool. Here, these forces are embodied respectively in technocratic state-led comprehensive redevelopment, notably Housing Market Renewal and its LIFE and ZOO zoning models; and in alternative community-led rehabilitation projects such as the Turner Prize-winning Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust. By tracing the surprisingly intimate interactions and multiple contradictions between these apparently opposing spatial projects, the production of neighbourhood is shown to be a complex, often violent political process, whose historical trajectories require disentangling in order to understand how we might construct better urban futures