Bringing Home the Housing Crisis: Domicide and Precarity in Inner London
Bringing Home the Housing Crisis: Domicide and Precarity in Inner London Melanie Nowicki Royal Holloway, University of London PhD Geography, September 2017 1 Declaration of Authorship I, Melanie Nowicki, declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Dated: 24/08/2017 2 Abstract This thesis explores the impact of United Kingdom Coalition/Conservative government housing policies on inner London’s low-income residents. It focuses specifically on the bedroom tax (a social housing reform introduced in 2013) and the criminalisation of squatting in a residential building (introduced in 2012) as case studies. These link to, and contribute towards, three main areas of scholarly and policy interest. First is the changing nature of welfare in the UK, and the relationship between social disadvantage and policy rhetoric in shaping public attitudes towards squatters and social tenants. Second, the thesis initiates better understanding of what impact the policies have made on the homelives of squatters and social tenants, and on housing segregation and affordability more broadly. Third, it highlights the multifaceted ways in which different squatters and social tenants protest and resist the two policies. Methodologically, the thesis is based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with squatters, social tenants affected by the bedroom tax, and multiple stakeholders, including housing association employees, housing solicitors and local councillors. Critical discourse analysis was also employed in order to analyse rhetoric surrounding the two policies. This involved the analysis of political speeches and news articles. Conceptually, the thesis argues for the centrality of critical geographies of home in its analysis and does so through the concepts of domicide, home unmaking, and precarity in order to understand the home as a complex and fluid part of both the lifecourse and wider social politics.
[Show full text]