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In summer 2014, I attended a public gathering in a small square in the Carpenters Estate, an East London council estate slated for demolition. The event was organised by a collective of single mothers called Focus E15 to mark the occupation of four vacant flats to raise awareness about the destruction of social rented housing in the borough of Newham. Within days, both the protest-occupation and the collective gained high visibility in the national media, becoming something of a flagship struggle in London’s housing activism, as well as a clear inspiration for other direct actions against displacement, accumulation by dispossession and gentrification (Gillespie et al, 2018). In photographs, the occupation was usually framed by a large green banner, hanging in front of the facade: ‘These homes need people, these people need homes.’ The slogan drew attention to the need for social rented housing while denouncing a wasteful system. Powerfully and effectively, it presented a clear antithesis: vacant houses and unhomed people are to be brought together to solve a material, as well as rhetorical, tension. The slogan, I later discovered, had been directly inspired by the chant ‘gente sin casas, casas sin gente’ (‘people without homes, homes without people’) of the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) in Spain (Di Feliciantonio, 2017; García-Lamarca, 2017). The ease with which the slogan had travelled between the two contexts evidences not only the important work of transnational solidarity and learning post-2008, but also the resurgence of a politicisation of vacant housing through direct action across the world (Dizon, 2019; Ferreri, 2020b; Noterman, 2020), which demands critical attention (see also the remaining chapters in Part III, this volume).
Between 2005 and 2015, nearly 140,000 homes in Detroit faced mortgage or tax foreclosure. The Great Recession obliterated black wealth, shattered neighbourhoods and intensified economic uncertainty in US metropolises already weakened by decades of institutionalised segregation and population loss (Kurth and MacDonald, 2015). Over the course of just a few years, residents of Detroit fled in numbers bested only by New Orleans, LA, during the post-Hurricane Katrina flight. In May 2014, Motor City Mapping – a project of the public–private Detroit Blight Removal Task Force (DBRTF) – identified 78,000 buildings in some state of disrepair. DBRTF leaders concluded over 40,000 of these structures needed immediate demolition (Clark, 2014). The largest residential demolition programme in US history began awarding contracts that summer (Dolan, 2014).
For many, smashing these empty structures was common sense to escape the aftermath of the Great Recession and, like online mortgage impresario Dan Gilbert and Mayor Mike Duggan, most did not baulk at the billion-dollar price tag of a blight-free city. They shared the belief that vacant land was Detroit’s competitive advantage. In 2013, Gilbert – the Chairman of Quicken Loans and a staunch defender of his company’s poor record of mortgage foreclosures – said empty parcels would attract interests that ‘are going to develop them and develop them in mass as soon as we get the structures down and maybe we don’t have to worry about raising peas or corn or whatever it is you do in the farm’ (McGraw, 2013).
Structural housing vacancy and abandonment occur in many circumstances and are phenomena that generally happen when something disturbs the overall ‘equilibrium’ of a given area. Urban scholarship has often considered these forms of housing emptiness in relationship to processes of urban decline, suburbanisation, deindustrialisation, financial crises and the collapse of local housing markets (Keenan et al, 1999; Glock and Haussermann, 2004; O’Callaghan et al, 2018). Indeed, in certain contexts, processes of economic and social restructuring have led to declining or collapsing demand, resulting in housing underuse, disuse and eventual abandonment (Power and Mumford, 1999; Couch and Cocks, 2013; Wang and Immergluck, 2019). Far from being natural, these processes are often closely linked to the political economy of uneven development and to the action of discrete actors in the realms of the state, the real estate industry and finance (Coppola, 2019).
However, although there is a growing literature on housing emptiness associated with issues of spatial restructuring and urban shrinkage (see Gribat, this volume), its connections to natural disasters have been largely ignored. Disasters dramatically impact the stability of territories, resulting in places that are suddenly shut off and collapse socially and economically (Myers, 2002; Black et al, 2013; Drolet, 2015). Great natural disasters may exceed the ability of communities to recover, especially when pre-impact conditions make the emergency response and reconstruction difficult and costly. Indeed, the combination of damages and territories already experiencing forms of urban decline or contraction leads to longer-lasting socio-spatial impacts.
In recent years, human geography and other related fields have developed an increasing interest in ruins of the recent past. Expressions such as ‘ruins of modernity’ (Dawdy, 2010; Hell and Schönle, 2010), ‘industrial ruins’ (Edensor, 2005; Mah, 2012) or ‘new ruins’ (Kitchin et al, 2014; Martin, 2014) bear witness to rising attention to the relevance of studying material leftovers of our time. Throughout these debates, several attempts have been made to define what is ‘new’ about ruins of today. Kitchin et al (2014) consider the ruins that appeared after the global financial crisis in 2008 as a new form of ruination because, here, ruins were not a result of disuse, but a product of speculation about a promised future. The ‘ghost estates’ in Ireland, for instance, have never been used and are therefore considered testimonies of novel financialised forms of urbanisation. Another differentiation between ‘old’ and ‘new’ ruins can be found in Dylan Trigg’s (2009: 142–50) The Aesthetics of Decay. Comparing ‘classical’ and post-industrial ruins, Trigg pursues the argument that the classical ruin, in contrast to the ruin of the present, is no longer considered as in an active process of decay, which allows us to perceive it as an absolute object in order, which might even be viewed as a beautiful object. In the ruin of the present, however, the process of decay is still ongoing, offering an understanding of ruins as structures in which decay is still hovering. In the new ruin, disorder and ongoing destruction predominate aesthetic perception.
The definition of urban vacancy is fraught with conceptual and practical difficulties. The definitions vary as widely as do the different forms of state intention designed to reduce vacancy. With this in mind, the proposition here is that vacancy is the frontier space where different spatio-legal world-making projects collide. This chapter centres on three conflicting spatio-legal logics and how they relate to persistent vacant spaces in the centre of São Paulo. Recent statistics for the metropolitan region highlight the explosive combination of 595,691 vacant buildings with the potential of being occupied and 639,839 inhabitants left homeless or living in precarious conditions (Fundação Pinheiros, 2018). On the one hand, a market logic values vacancy as a necessary condition for the generation of speculative profits. On the other, the bureaucratic logic of controlled consumption views vacancy as inefficient because it does not provide socially or economically productive uses. Lastly, squatting movements see the potential in these vacant spaces to reduce the astronomical housing deficit and, in particular, the lack of centrally located social housing.
This chapter argues that vacancy is a socially constructed category (Sack, 1983), both spatially and legally (Delaney, 2010). Ideas of empty property and empty space are entwined and cannot be completely separated. Spaces are considered vacant because they are not deemed economically or socially productive, and because they do not present visible signs of being actively owned. The physical emptiness can facilitate potential sales or being filled with different social uses (Vasudevan, 2015). However, the concept of vacancy is contested.
This chapter focuses on the rise of radical actions as a response to the extreme austerity implemented by the Irish government after the global financial crisis of 2008. Globally, the presence and visibility of vacant spaces in urban sites contributed to their use by activists to imagine alternative futures (DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013; Németh and Langhorst, 2014; Ziehl and Oßwald, 2015). There has been an increase in using occupation-based practices as strategies to claim space and achieve political goals (Vasudevan, 2015, 2017; Wood, 2017). After the financial crisis, Ireland’s landscape was littered with vacant buildings and ghost estates – the ‘new ruins of Ireland’ (Kitchin et al, 2014). These ruins were physical reminders of ‘everything that had gone wrong with Ireland’ (Hosford, 2017). As Hearne et al (2018: 154) insightfully argue, ‘activism has been shaped by, and has acted as a response to, the main characteristics of each period and the different crises generated by them’. Ireland faced a ‘tsunami of austerity’ (Hearne, 2014: 18), resulting in a housing and homelessness crisis, with over 9,000 homeless people in April 2020 (Focus Ireland, 2020). As a response, there was an increase in movements in Ireland that used housing and occupation as strategies for political action (see also the chapter by Di Feliciantonio and O’Callaghan, this volume).
A long patch of vacant land appears through the windows of the train moving from the airport to the centre of Berlin. This linear zone of grasslands stretches alongside the tracks passing through the south-eastern district of Schöneweide. A former roundhouse drifts by, followed by a derelict brewery covered in shrubs and a banner appealing to ‘leave no one behind’. Traversing Berlin’s track wilderness has long stirred the imagination of artists and filmmakers. In the 1981 film Berliner Stadtbahnbilder, the German writer and director Alfred Behrens secretly captured his train journeys across the divided city. The film portrays a marooned transport network of geopolitically induced disrepair: deserted platforms and defunct tracks overgrown by birch trees; a railway landscape suspended in time; or, as Behrens describes it, ‘a post-industrial wilderness at the heart of the city’.1
Over the past two decades, patches of this urban wilderness have been absorbed into prize-winning public parks. An example includes the Natur-Park Südgelände in Schöneberg that opened in May 2000 – an abandoned railway yard that was designated a nature reserve and conservation area, with grassland biotopes and wild-growing woodlands (Kowarik and Langer, 2005). Another example, which has been widely celebrated in the field of landscape design, is Park am Gleisdreieck in Kreuzberg, completed in 2013. The park design evokes a new type of ‘wasteland aesthetic’ (Gandy, 2013: 1306) by integrating Gleiswildnis (‘track wilderness’), as signs label the remnants of wild forest, with various leisure and sports facilities.
