Exploring the spatial composition of UK social housing

With Nick Clare, Shaun French and Joe Kearsey, University of Nottingham.

Part of the Economic Worlds Seminar Series.

Social housing occupies a contradictory position. On the one hand it can help decommodify and ‘common’ housing (Hodkinson, 2012), while on the other it currently reproduces racialised forms of capitalism (Clare et al., 2022). Based on longstanding qualitative research and building on a spatialised autonomist Marxist framework (Gray and Clare, 2022), this paper considers forms of resistance and control in the social housing sector.

In order to combat (social) rentierism and landlordism it is crucial to build solidarity among tenants, but also examine the relationships between tenants and housing workers: while they may typically share class positions, often-racialised power dynamics can constrain radical political organising. Fostering solidarity and making sense of these tensions requires detailed tenants’ and workers’ inquiries (Risager, 2021), that offer the potential for social housing to be recovered as a site to challenge the commodification and financialisation of housing and the city.