Rent and its Discontents

Neil Gray is an urban researcher, writer and lecturer and a long-term housing activist. He is currently working as a Research Associate at the University of Glasgow.

• Preface: Seán Damer, Housing and Direct Action’ / Introduction: Neil Gray, ‘Rent Unrest: From the 1915 Rent Strikes to Contemporary Housing Agitation’ / Part 1: History Against the Grain / Chapter 1: Pam Currie, ‘“A Wondrous Spectacle”: Protest, Class and Femininity in the 1915 Rent Strikes’ / Chapter 2: Annmarie Hughes and Valerie Wright, ‘What Did the Rent Strikers Do Next? Women and “The Politics of the Kitchen” in Interwar Scotland’ / Chapter 3: Tony Cox, ‘“Oary”’ Dundee and Working Class Self-Organization in the 1915 Rent Strike’ / Chapter 4: Neil Gray, ‘Spatial Composition and the Urbanization of Capital: The 1915 Glasgow Rent Strikes and the Housing Question Reconsidered’ / Part 2: Reports from the Housing Frontline / Chapter 5: Vickie Cooper and Kirsteen Paton, ‘Everyday Eviction in the Twenty-First Century’ / Chapter 6: Michael Byrne, ‘Tenant Self-Organization after the Irish Crisis: The Dublin Tenants Association’ / Chapter 7: Living Rent (Emma Saunders, Kate Samuels and Dave Statham), ‘Rebuilding a Shattered Housing Movement: Living Rent and Contemporary Private Tenant Struggles in Scotland’ / Chapter 8: Paul Watt, ‘Social Housing Not Social Cleansing’: Contemporary Housing Struggles in London / Part 3: Rethinking the Housing Question: Theories, Aims, Tactics and Strategies for Today / Chapter 9: Hamish Kallin and Tom Slater, ‘The Myth and Realities of Rent Control’ / Chapter 10: Rory Hearne, Cian O'Callaghan, Rob Kitchin, and Cesare Di Feliciantonio, ‘The Relational Articulation of Housing Crisis and Activism in Post-Crash Dublin, Ireland’ / Chapter 11: Sarah Glynn, ‘“Only Alternative Municipal Housing”’: Making the Case for Public Housing Then and Now’ / Chapter 12: Tim Joubert and Stuart Hodkinson, ‘Beyond the Rent Strike, Towards the Commons: Why the Housing Question Requires Activism that Generates its Own Alternatives’ / Afterword: Neil Gray, ‘The Futures of Housing Activism’

This compelling book reminds us that decent housing has been fought for and won through struggle, by thousands of people in grass-roots campaigns, in direct action and protest, over one hundred years. It demonstrates the achievements and the continuing urgency of need in the long campaign for a fairer housing system.