Transgressive City-Making and Governance

Saila-Maria Saaristo is an urban anthropologist based at ISCTE's DINÂMIA'CET. A researcher and a practitioner, she is working on the intersection of housing precarity, gender, and migration, with recent articles in Housing Studies and Radical Housing Journal.

• Acknowledgements ixList of Figures and Tables xAbbreviations xii1 From Old to New Housing Struggles 11 Occupations as a Form of Making the City 12 Hands Off Our Homes! 72.1 Long-Standing Housing Crises: Migration and PostcolonialHousing Exclusions 82.2 Residual Social Housing 132.3 New Housing Crises: Financialisation of Housing andReal-Estate Speculation 152.4 The New Urban Housing Policies 192.5 The Global Context: Forced Evictions and Rising Housing Costs 223 A Researcher in Solidarity? Methodological Reflections 243.1 Antecedents 243.2 Research ‘Sites’ 263.3 Critical Ethnography and Activist Research 292 Urban Governance and City-Making 331 Introduction 332 Urban Neoliberalisms 342.1 Neoliberalism as a Capitalist Project 342.2 Displaced Survival – Gender, Labour and Housing Precarity 392.3 Neoliberalism as a Mode of Government 423 Urban Contestations 453.1 Examining Occupations 453.2 Insights from the Feminist Literature of Agency 483.3 Insights from Subaltern Urbanisms 503.4 Coalescence into Collective Action 533.5 Movement Strategies 573 Gendered, Classed and Racialised Forms of Housing Precarity 621 Why Occupations? 622 Housing Histories: Cycles of Displacement and Dispossession 672.1 Immigrating to Portugal and Resettlements 672.2 Displacement Caused by Violence at Home 69vi Contents2.3 Housing Exclusions Due to Inaccessible Social Housing 712.4 Displacement Due to Unaffordability of Private Rental Sector 762.5 Evictions Causing Further Dispossession 783 To Conclude 824 Governing Access to Housing and Evictions 851 Governing against and through Informality 852 Managing Resettlements: Participation in OlderHousing Operations 873 Invited Spaces of Participation: Current Co-governance of theCouncil Estates 914 Managing Council Estates: Invisible Elbows, Competition andVisible Fists 944.1 Invisible Elbows: Faulty Management Intersecting withSocial Biases 944.2 Neoliberal Responses: In-the-Meanwhile Solutions,Self-responsibilisation and Competition 994.3 Visible Fists: Evicting Families from Access to Housing 1045 To Conclude 1115 Makeshift Urbanism by Occupation 1141 Occupations: Making the Urban from Below 1142 Previous Occupations 1163 Framing Occupations – a Crime, or a Last Resort? 1204 Practices of Occupation 1244.1 Local Networks 1244.2 Home-Making through Improvised Materialism 1264.3 Rhythms of Hiding and Making Pressure: How to Negotiate with theCity Councils 1274.4 Building Alliances 1325 To Conclude 1346 Social Movements against Evictions: the Habita Association’sContribution to the Struggle 1381 Social Movements against Evictions 1382 Housing Movements in Portugal 1413 Theoretical Practices 1443.1 Real Estate Speculation, Housing Financialisation and NeoliberalHousing Policies 1443.2 Racism and Gender-Based Violence 146viiContents4 Building Political Subjectivities 1484.1 Constraints on Participation 1484.2 Breaking the Model of Personal Responsibilisation 1535 Strategising Collective Action 1565.1 Invented, Invited, and In-between Strategies 1565.2 Conquering Space by Transgression 1585.3 Building Bases with Support and Negotiation 1635.4 Operating in Invited Spaces 1666 To Conclude 1697 Conclusion: Subjectivities of Evictions and Occupations 170References 183Appendix 216Index 218