Our interdisciplinary Urban Studies list examines how the built environment shapes behaviour and how to address complex problems like urban poverty, gentrification, climate change and educational inequality.
Subjects covered include urban planning, urban geography, urban policy, local governance and community-based participation, to offer a broad understanding of how urban dynamics shape both global interdependence and local spaces.
Urban Studies
This chapter summarises the material of the book. It revisits some of its core theoretical themes, suggesting that there are openings within the fissures presented by rentier capitalism’s corrosion of community, and its densification of everyday life within dwindling space. The author argues that these openings incorporate alternative strategies of social reproduction that signal a ‘will to become’: a desire for generational reconfiguration borne from the erosion of ‘secure’ pathways to traditional kinship structures.
This chapter looks at the ways that affective politics circulate within precarious rental accommodation, amidst constricted desires and difficulties in holding boundaries. Moving from a discussion of sexual constriction to feelings of ‘displaced sovereignty’ among respondents who are mistreated by, yet defend, controlling landlord behaviour, the chapter makes connections between capital’s constriction of embodied agency and the suppression of political subjectivity. In the second part of the chapter, the author explores the efforts of queer collective households to realign their homes with desire for social and political transformation, and the tensions and challenges experienced along the way.
This chapter sets out the substantive content of the book and its broad themes of generational inequality, housing unaffordability and intimate relationships. The chapter includes an account of the author’s personal housing experiences and an overview of their critique of the nuclear family. The author connects the generational disjunctures posed by housing inequality to the diminishing political purchase of the home-owning family, identifying the precarious intimacies of the rented sector as fertile ground for exploring this historical moment in the history of capitalism. There is also a discussion of methods.
This chapter explores the immaterial, affective and invisibilised labour that renting respondents carried out to replenish their relationships. It first focuses on the affective labour carried out by some social housing residents affected by intergenerational histories of racial capitalism – something the author terms ‘cumulative precarity’. The chapter goes on to explore the precarious relational labour involved in creating a sense of belonging in transient, privately rented homes, looking at relationships to home improvement and outdoor space.
This chapter draws out the politics of renting respondents’ reproductive imaginaries, and how they speak to the different lives that can be made and remade amidst precarity. The chapter explores the assumed dependentlessness embedded in the transient temporalities and dense spaces of London renting, and examines the ways that both social and private tenants’ access to social reproduction is eroded by the formulation of housing as either investment or consumption. The final section of this chapter shifts focus from the reproduction of families to the reproduction of romantic relationships.
In a time of increasing social and economic inequality, this book illustrates the precarity experienced by millennials facing both rising rents and wage stagnation. Featuring the voices of those with lived experience of precarity in north-east London, MacNeil Taylor focuses on intimacy, reproduction and emotional labour.
The book widens readers’ understanding of a middle-class ‘generation rent’ beyond those locked out of anticipated home ownership by considering both social and private renters. Situated in a feminist and queer theoretical framework, the book reveals the crucial role of British policy-making on housing, welfare, and immigration on deepening inter- and intra-generational inequality.
This chapter provides a conceptual overview of the theoretical literature and research on precarity, intimacy and reproduction. It unites these concepts to formulate a theory of precarious intimacy as the ‘place between difficulty and desire’ in insecure rented accommodation. This chapter also offers a geo-historical account of the assetisation of housing in Britain and specifically in London, with emphasis on the imperialist politics undergirding this process.
In this chapter I make the case for the importance and significance of social class to the lives of public housing tenants. Class may well provide homologous conditions and solidarity, but it is also the great divider of society into those who work and those who benefit from those who work. The Bridgetown Estate is a microcosm of class in Ireland. Class originates and is sustained in relations between groups, much more than it is something based on static positions. I argue in this chapter that class is both materially and morally significant to the lives of the people of the Bridgetown Estate. The class system produces scarcity, lack, and inequality because the material production of the society is tethered to a profit-seeking capitalist model. There is therefore a strong connection between the ontology of the estate and the frameworks and epistemologies that are used to explain why things are the way they are. My argument is that estates such as the Bridgetown Estate are effectively vehicles and containers for class relations and class processes and that this understanding leads to a very different form of explanatory critique than one based on the deprivation–disadvantage paradigm.
This final chapter brings the reader back to the place that is the Bridgetown Estate and explores the relationship of the estate to the broader city, while returning at the end of the chapter to the phenomenology of place. The Bridgetown Estate was a product of an emerging ‘modern’ Ireland along with many other similar estates in the city. But, as well as being a local place for people to live in, the estate has always been connected to the city economically and culturally. The chapter makes a connection between class history and class geography and shows how the two are intimately connected. The city is a class text of buildings and streets, but too often we don’t read it properly or don’t know how to read it properly. The ‘production of space’, as Henri Lefebvre defines, it is closely related to processes that reflect the capitalist nature of the societies we live in. The landscape is organised according to capitalist principles of power and planning. The Bridgetown Estate reflects such processes in its constitution, conception and sheer physicality on the landscape. It is a class object located within a class geography.
It’s Not Where You Live It’s How You Live is an ethnographic study of the lives of the residents of a public housing estate in Dublin. The phrase comes from the residents themselves, who used it on a number of occasions to assert that they were as good as anyone else. The book is a deep, complex and prolonged exploration of the lives of the working-class people of the Bridgetown Estate. The difficulty that residents face, however, is that their lives are shaped and conditioned by mechanisms and structures that place them in particular locations both in the social world and in the physical landscape. The study focuses on residents’ positioning and limitations within a changing field of public housing, the types of work that they do, how they make ends meet financially, how their lives are affected by austerity and longer-term changes in capitalism. In this book the emphasis is placed on the importance of class relations and processes and how they shape and mould lives and lock people into positions of subordination and suffering. There is also a strong focus on the importance of gender, especially for the women of the estate and the importance of solidary relations of love, care and solidarity for them. This book uses a critical realist theoretical framework to understand and make sense of how public housing estates are constituted in that, as well as what we see and what happens, we also need a causal criterion to understand them.
