Heroes of their own story: agency and resistance in UK housing governance

In this paper I want to consider the problem of resistance and agency and to look again at how we understand the challenge of social movements and the impact they have on governmental regimes

New nomads: the dispossession of the consumer in social housing

With the advent of flexible tenancies, marketised rents, the abolition of a consumer-focused regulator and the disbanding of the National Tenant Voice, three decades of efforts to induce consumer pressure in the English social housing sector have been abandoned by the Coalition Government. It appears social housing tenants in England are no longer to be considered as consumers and have been returned instead to their stigmatised identity as welfare dependents. While these twin identities have long characterised the position of tenants in the social housing sector, the promise of liberty and equality inherent in the role of the consumer has been the basis through which the quality of the offer of social housing has been maintained and through which claims on social citizenship have been launched. This paper analyses the mechanisms by which a consumer identity has been mobilised to ensure the resilience of the social housing sector in the face of continuous governmental erosion. Drawing on a detailed positioning analysis of discussions in tenants’ organisations, it investigates the use of a consumer identity in collective mobilisations to defend the quality of the sector and, inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and Hardt and Negri, it provides a theoretical framework through which to consider the potential for future claims on social citizenship on the margins of housing policy

Universal Claims: tenants’ campaigns for tenure neutrality and a general needs model of social housing

The policy of tenure neutrality championed by the International Union of Tenants advances a model of general needs or universal social rented housing provision unrestricted by income limits or needs-based rationing. Support for this model has been severely undermined by recent European Commission rulings that have restricted access to social housing to those least capable of coping in a competitive market place. As general needs demand for affordable housing continues to swell, the challenge for adherents of tenure neutrality is to demonstrate that universal social housing can meet both the needs of the most vulnerable and the demands of those excluded from homeownership by price inflation and credit limits. This paper examines the promotion of universal social housing by tenants’ organisations and challenges the extent to which this model is intended ‘for all’. It reviews strategies to reinvigorate support for tenure neutrality in arguments for widening access and supply of social housing

Subaltern imaginaries of localism: constructions of place, space and democracy in community-led housing organisations.

The localism strategies of the UK government provide a suite of ‘rights’ for community organisations that licence place-based political imaginaries with the intent to construct the community as a proxy for a smaller state. Conflating place with participation and promising to devolve power, localism authorises a performative enactment of democracy, citizenship and the ‘public’ through the lived experience of space. In constituting the local as a metaphor for democracy and empowerment, however, community localism foregrounds the pivotal role played by place and scale in cementing social differentiation and in naturalising hierarchical power relations. This paper explores the subaltern strategies of localism that may emerge when the rights of localism are exercised by residents’ organisations in marginalised communities of social housing. Drawing on research with community-led housing organisations it demonstrates how the spatial imaginations and spatial practices of localism can be implemented to assert new claims on democracy and citizenship. In particular it identifies four spatial practices – the extension of domestic space, the invocation of locality, the construction of domestic scale, and the scalar reimagining of democracy – that subvert the reordering of political space that is localism’s regulatory intent

The Tenants' Movement: the domestication and resurgence of a social movement in English housing policy

The launch of a National Tenants Voice for the English social housing sector rekindles a contentious debate among housing scholars over the role played by class and material interest in the mobilisation of collective action. The clear suggestion in the declaration of a National Tenants Voice is that tenants in the fragmented and residualised social housing sector share certain common interests that can be mobilised around, represented and promoted and that there exists a tenants’ movement that is effective to some degree in negotiating at national policy level. The contention that common interests rooted in class or sectoral divisions engender political conflict was the dominant theme in the application of Marxist and Weberian theory to the struggles of social housing tenants in the 1970s and early 1980s. This thesis was debunked in the 1990s when the restructuring of the social housing sector made the assumption of shared interests and common cause between tenants impossible to maintain. The return of the concept of shared interests applied to a tenants’ movement makes it necessary to re-examine the treatment of tenant collective action in academic studies. This paper explores the concept of material interest as applied to housing struggles and provides a new analysis of the mobilisation of tenant collective action. It concludes in setting out an interpretive framework based on social movement theory to guide further study into the mobilisation, aims and effectiveness of the tenants’ movement and its role in English housing policy

Capturing the castle: Tenant governance in social housing companies

In the contemporary landscape of social housing in Britain, the role of tenants on the governing boards of housing companies continues to be seen as deeply problematic. While tenant directors are recruited to bring a market-like influence to social housing governance, they appear to be approaching their positions as directors in a way that is contrary to the drive towards management efficiency. This paper adopts a social constructionist approach in order to recast the institutions of housing governance as contested articulations of ideology and the ‘problem’ of tenant board members as a hegemonic clash between discourses of governance. It concludes that tenant directors act as a significant dynamic in the political construction of social housing today

Collective Uncertainty in Partially-Polarized and Partially-Decohered Spin-1/2 Systems

It has become common practice to model large spin ensembles as an effective pseudospin with total angular momentum J = N x j, where j is the spin per particle. Such approaches (at least implicitly) restrict the quantum state of the ensemble to the so-called symmetric Hilbert space. Here, we argue that symmetric states are not generally well-preserved under the type of decoherence typical of experiments involving large clouds of atoms or ions. In particular, symmetric states are rapidly degraded under models of decoherence that act identically but locally on the different members of the ensemble. Using an approach [Phys. Rev. A 78, 052101 (2008)] that is not limited to the symmetric Hilbert space, we explore potential pitfalls in the design and interpretation of experiments on spin-squeezing and collective atomic phenomena when the properties of the symmetric states are extended to systems where they do not apply.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure