Becoming displaceable, feeling displacing, un/doing displacement – Conceptualizing urban residential displacements as dissimilar experiences amidst the global housing affordability crisis

Abstract

ABSTRACT Urban residential displacement (URD) displays its expansive character globally in the current housing affordability crisis, reinforcing both violent and more subtle, everyday-life-related dynamics. Yet, a comprehensive theorization of variegated forms of crisis-generated URD as witnessed in the Global North remains underdeveloped. To address URD more broadly, I propose a distinct reading around the concepts of “becoming displaceable”, “feeling displacing”, and “un/doing displacement”. These three conceptual entry points constitute the political-economic, cognitive-affective, and socio-spatial dimensions of URD. The triad allows us to study the relational spatio-temporal dynamics that displacees perceive and experience enforced by power relations related to housing economies. This nuanced, praxeologically, and Deleuze-inspired perspective further contributes to an advanced understanding of the emergence of classed, racialised/ethnicised, and gendered URD processes. The interaction of the three pillars opens up different rooms for manoeuver dealing with and navigating through URDs, ultimately diversifying them. Furthermore, it allows us to understand the processual and non-linear unfolding of URD and relate dissimilar forms to each other.