Take back the city: occupation, housing activism, and digital/material contention in post-crash Dublin

Abstract

This paper adopts an empirical focus on the everyday practices of Take Back the City, a housing activist campaign in Summer 2018 in Dublin, as an illustration of occupations as digital/material contention. It outlines how the temporary political occupations of vacant buildings were organised and unfolded across a digital/material nexus. I argue that reading occupations as digital/material (a) extends understandings of how urban struggles actually take place in contemporary cities, and (b) highlights the central role of the digital in contentious space-times before, during, and in the wake of temporary political occupations. I use the Take Back the City campaign to explore the relationship between urban spaces, digital technologies, and contemporary housing movements. Echoing recent work on radical urban space-times, I emphasise the digital/material practices and temporalities of the Take Back the City campaign as a useful example for research on the makeshift, improvised, and often uncertain ways in which digital technologies and urban space are now enrolled in struggles over housing futures.