Abstract
One of the hallmarks of the austerity agenda in the UK has been the discursive prevalence of both scarcity and individual responsibility as justifications for drastic cuts to public services. In the context of London's housing crisis, cuts to welfare for low‐income tenants have resulted in an alarming rise in evictions and homelessness within a wider context of displacement and gentrification in the city. This article explores how embryonic resistance to these processes, as well as to deeper histories of dispossession, is undertaken by housing activists through a set of ethical practices that promote collectivized care and mutual support among those faced with housing precarity. Although these emergent networks are fragile, it argues that a nascent housing movement in London offers some compelling glimpses of a more hopeful politics that may lie just beneath the surface of the present moment.
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The management of the building, which housed a mixture of council tenants, owner-occupier leaseholders and private renters, had been outsourced to an ‘arm’s length’ Tenant Management Organization (TMO) by the local council, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
Summary
LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Since the early 1980s, a succession of policies has eroded the availability of public housing, removed rights and protections in the private rented sector, aggressively gentrified inner-city boroughs and privileged the interests of developers and speculators over the needs of working-class residents.
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