Cracking buildings, cracking capitalism: antagonism, affect, and the importance of squatting for housing justice

In this paper I argue that squatting provides a concrete and theoretical location for dismantling binaries between successful and failed resistance. Focusing on the development of a political and affective consciousness and the inherent antagonism within squatting above the temporality of an individual squat or occupation helps to recentre the ‘urban political’ and understand the value and power of the urban commons. I combine radical democracy and affect theory to argue for the centrality of squatting in challenging urban capitalist hegemony. Not only does squatting transform consciousness, but the physically and emotionally supportive practices that it engenders helps to return the emotive as well as the political to the urban environment. I support this claim with reference to the successful 2015 Aylesbury occupation in London, which the occupiers approached with affective solidarity and a desire to reclaim space through antagonistic urban insurrection.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Behind barricaded doors : gender, class, and power in the London squatting movement

I explore how gender and class inform power dynamics within the London squatting movement. In perpetually precarious and temporary housing, squatters exist on the border between housed and homelessness, and squats operate as a location for both domestic and collective politics, making this a rich field for analysing classed and gendered politics and negotiations in both private and public spheres. I look at several intersecting realms through which power and hierarchy are forged and distributed: the embodied and performative self; interpersonal relations and social space; and spatial relationships in material locations. My investigation functions both as a case study for an under researched ‘subculture’ and as an exploration into homemaking and everyday social relations under conditions of precarity and vulnerability, with implications for research into the broader axes of power relations in our unstable housing market. My qualitative research methods are semi-structured interviews and participant observation, over 18 months in the field, and my personal experiences as an ex-squatter. I use a thematic and deductive content analysis to generate and organise my data. My methodology is situated within feminist and militant ethnographic traditions, in recognition of my own participation within squatter communities and commitment to the project of creating alternative and equitable homescapes

Radical housing (dis)encounters: reframing housing research and praxis

We came to this issue before the outbreak of Covid-19, and we release it amidst what feels like an entirely new, and yet also entirely known world-order—a place of multiple and multiplying crises that existed before the pandemic and continue, relentlessly, to render certain people, bodies and homes disposable. It is against this cruelty, but also with a renewed sense of radical hope in justice everywhere, that RHJ first came to be. The majority of contributions to Issue 2.2 emerge from a long process of designing and selecting participants for the event Radical Housing Encounters: translocal conversations on knowledge and praxis. This event was meant to take place in person, in three separate locations simultaneously, at the end of May 2020. Through it, we sought to define and re-define radical housing knowledge and practice, paying particular attention to diverse methodological, theoretical and ethical approaches deployed in both research and militant practice around the globe. While disappointed that the event could not take place as originally planned, its rationale and ethics of care are central to the making of this issue and are reflected in the texts of its contributors as well as the process of organising the issue