Precarity and Public Housing

Abstract

Precarity and Public Housing Emily J. Hogg (bio) and Bryan Yazell (bio) INTRODUCTION: PRECARITY, TEMPORALITY, AND PUBLIC HOUSING In 2022, five years after the fire that killed seventy-two people, Grenfell Tower still stands in West London, scaffolded, covered with plastic, and surrounded by hoarding. The hoarding, intended to be a temporary protective measure while a decision was taken on whether to demolish the Tower, has become the site of collective commemoration: the impermanent structure displays messages, photos, and artworks, including a community-created mosaic, which commemorate those who died and confront the systemic injustice that caused the fire to become so destructive.1 Renovation of the building, which was owned by the local government, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and was predominately home to social housing tenants, did not meet legal standards.2 The materials used fed rather than hampered the fire, and residents state that a series of warnings they made about fire safety before the disaster were ignored.3 A recent report by the Grenfell Tower Memorial Commission states that given this history, some of the residents, survivors, and bereaved wish the Tower to remain standing in case "what happened will be forgotten. . . . if Grenfell Tower no longer marks the west London skyline, the general public will think that the tragedy has closure and it's time to move on—and there will be less pressure to deliver justice."4 Others want the Tower demolished for reasons that also have to do with justice and its timeframes. They worry about "how growing up literally in the shadow of the Tower impacts on their children. It's not possible to know how long justice might take, and there are no guarantees that it will ever come."5 Writing years before the Grenfell fire, Owen Hatherley described a particular sense of temporal disjunction associated with social housing, seeing "the council blocks that still stand all over Britain's cities" as the remains "in present-day Britain of the brief rush of Bevanite Socialism that followed the war."6 They are [End Page 13] remnants that recall the utopian ambitions of the postwar welfare state, even as they have degradingly become seen as what Lynsey Hanley calls "holding cages for the poor and disenfranchised," frequently threatened with demolition, privatized, stigmatized in cultural narratives and, as the Grenfell disaster so starkly shows, often poorly maintained by their municipal owners.7 When the dreams of social mobility and reliable security associated with postwar social democracy have become increasingly difficult to believe in, and no new way of imagining future flourishing has emerged, there is, according to Lauren Berlant, a situation of "impasse." The impasse is: a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things. . . . The holding pattern implied in "impasse" suggests a temporary housing.8 This dossier takes this final sentence, and its connection between housing and the temporal feel of the present, literally. Focusing on European social housing developments, as sites connected both aesthetically and historically with the welfare state and its egalitarian aspirations, it asks how what Hanley terms the "holding cage" and Berlant the "holding pattern" are related and considers the ways artistic mediations of the social housing development register the precarious temporalities of the present. Although the particularities of housing estates differ in individual national contexts, there are strong continuities—both symbolically and, in terms of design and construction, literally—between developments in different European states.9 Turning to the precarious time implicit in housing places in dialogue several critical approaches that while often expressing adjacent concerns, are rarely discussed together: precariousness as a shared socio-ontological condition, uneven temporalities, and the lived experience within social housing. Guy Standing touches on the confluence of these concepts in his expansive definition of the "precariat," which names the denizens most affected by neoliberalism's dismantling of the welfare state. For Standing, any potential solidarity within the precariat runs against the fragmented temporality that internally divides this "class-in-the-making."10...