Housing Movements, Commons and ‘Precarious Institutionalization’

ABSTRACT

Understanding the relationship between struggles for housing justice and alternative housing models is riddled with epistemological and methodological challenges. A posteriori definitions of specific housing typologies – for example, “co-operative housing” – fail to account for the often informal and fluid practices that constitute the emergence of housing commoning through collective organizing. This paper offers an empirically grounded theoretical analysis of the development of short-life co-operative housing in London, UK, since the 1970s. Taking a longitudinal view, it explores how performative power surges by squatters and other precariously housed people were sustained by federative organizing and aligned with central and municipal institutional experimentation, giving rise to significant, if precarious, shifts in housing policy and practice. The concept of “precarious institutionalization” names this state of contingency and furthers a political analysis of the maintenance of housing commoning against multiple enclosures, with wider implications for scholarship on contemporary movements for decommodified self-managed housing.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarious institutionalization
• social movements
• co-operative housing
• London
• squatting

Acknowledgments

This article was made possible by the generous time of all research participants and radical housing archivists in London – thank you. Elements of this paper were presented on 28^th March 2018 as part as part of the ongoing ‘The Politics of Organised Squatting’ research at MayDay Rooms, London. The current draft was first discussed as part of the workshop ‘Retheorizing housing and activism’ organized by Jennie Gustafsson, Carina Listerborn and Irene Molina on 19^th May 2022. My thanks go to the organizers of the workshop and the SI, to Claire Colomb for suggestions on an earlier draft, and to all those who contributed to this work through comments and questions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For an overview of the complex and variegated landscape of legal forms taken by co-operatives, including housing co-operatives, in the United Kingdom, see https://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/legalforms (accessed 22 November 2022).

2. All research participants gave written informed consent; interviewees have been fully anonymized.

3. These included the Mutuals register of the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the co-operative housing database of the British Social Housing Federation (BSHF), and the unpublished database of the London Federation of Co-operative Housing.

4. Data about the histories of housing co-operatives is fragmented and often difficult to obtain, and this account is inevitably partial. Archives included the Advisory Services for Squatters’ historical archive, deposited at the Bishopsgate Institute, and London’s housing movements archives at May Day Rooms and 56a Infoshop.

5. For further detail, I refer to Fitzpatrick’s typology of mutual housing in the UK (Fitzpatrick 2018, 28).

6. Acronym for Short Life Users Groups: a tongue-in-cheek reference to unauthorized house infestation.

7. Gaining degrees of stability had significant implications for the possibility of developing radical social and cultural movements in the city, as many activists, visual and performance artists, writers, actors, and musicians, famously lived in squats and short-life co-operatives. Just to name a few, Seymour Housing Co-op was home to Joe Strummer of the Clash, while many residents of the squat-turned-co-operative Abeona worked in the experimental Oval House Theatre, which supported the emergence of gay, lesbian and women’s theatre in the 1970s and 1980s (Potrony 2015).

8. See ABC Southwark Housing Co-op, https://www.abchousing.co.uk/about/history (last accessed on 15 September 2023).

Additional information

Funding

The research presented in this paper was made possible thanks to the support of the European Commission Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Programme [grant No 665919]. The writing up was supported through the ‘Inhabiting Radical Housing’ ERC Starting Grant project, n. 851940.