THE EtHICS OF SPACE THE EtHICS OF SPACE HOMELESSNESS AND SQUATTING IN URBAN ENGLAND Steph Grohmann Hau Books Chicago © 2020 Hau Books The Ethics of Space: Homelessness and Squatting in Urban England by Steph Grohmann is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover design: Daniele Meucci Layout design: Deepak Sharma, Prepress Plus Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-1-912808-28-1 [paperback] ISBN: 978-1-912808-38-0 [PDF] LCCN: 2019956078 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.org Hau Books publications are printed, marketed, and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. For all who are out of place Table of Contents Acknowledgements ix Preface xi Introduction 1 Chapter One: Of life and fieldwork 47 The“field” as morally neutral zone 55 Chapter Two: Shelter 67 An attack on one is an attack on all 75 Chapter Three: Hope 90 Becoming at home 100 Chapter Four: Codes of honor and protection 111 Of apes and anarchists 118 Chapter Five: Total places 133 The Big Society strikes back 141 Chapter Six: The enemy within 153 The eturnr of the savage noble 164 viii THE EtHICS OF SPACE Chapter Seven: Fragments 177 Death and sanctions 187 Chapter Eight: Circle the wagons 204 Extinction 213 Epilogue 231 Index 239 Reference List 249 Ethnographic Vignettes: Trolley Problem 45 Refugee 66 Spell 89 Through the Looking Glass 131 Clash 175 Dispatch 202 Acknowledgements This book has been a long time in the making, and it would be impossible to list here all who have contributed to making it possible. Special thanks goes to: Nicholas De Genova, Brian Alleyne, Victoria Goddard, Frances Pine, Sophie Day, Pauline von Hellermann, Stephen Nugent, Magda Buchczyk, Katie Aston, Aimee Joyce, Zahira Araguete-Toribio, Alexandra Urdea, William Tantam, Krzysztof Bierski, Elizabeth Saleh, Maka Suarez, Cy Elliott Smith, Alena Hale, Claude Jousselin, Souad Usayran, and all staff and students at Goldsmiths who have shaped my thinking; Pieter Francois, Harvey Whitehouse, the Seshat and Aligned teams, Carlos Moreno-Leguizamon, David Smith, Roy Bhaskar, Tim Rutzou, Michiel van Ingen, Phil Gorski, Laura Brace, Fiona Cuthill, Charlotte Clarke, the Right to Home network, Hylton White, Vita Peacock, Enrique Martino, Faun Rice, Giovanni da Col, Michelle Beckett; my family, especially my parents Fritz and Brigitte, Lukas and Amelie, Nonna, who would have loved to see this book in print, Nunu Kaller, Dieter Ratz, John West; the two anonymous reviewers who have invested great time and care into helping me improve the manuscript; and of course all squatters and allies without whom this book would have never been written. Preface to The Ethics of Space: Homelessness and Squatting in Urban England by Steph Grohmann Nicholas De Genova The ethics of space: Homelessness and squatting in urban England is a rare and ex- traordinary work that deftly integrates fine-grained and sensitive ethnogra- phy with a bold philosophical imagination. With this remarkable book, Steph Grohmann not only exhibits her remarkable capabilities as an ethnographic researcher with a tenacious critical intellect—attuned to the complexities of contemporary hierarchies of wealth, power, and prestige—but also delights the reader with her exceptional talents as a writer. Based on fieldwork with squatters and other homeless people, primarily in Bristol, during which Grohmann was herself living as a squatter, the book examines how people who are not securely housed, and are therefore “home”-less, are also socially and politically produced as being always “out of place.” In this book, Grohmann transports the reader into a vivid and deeply mov- ing exploration of her firsthand experience of homelessness and squatting in urban England. Her purpose is not to reduce those experiences and struggles into a voyeuristic pornography of misery and marginalization, nor to orientalize or romanticize homeless people as the contemporary urban equivalent of wild “savages” with their own exotic culture. Rather, Grohmann aims to elaborate a xii THE EtHICS OF SPACE critical lens through which to ask fundamental questions about the larger con- figuration of social inequality and class hierarchy in neoliberal, neo-Victorian Britain. Grohmann’s incisive social critique does not remain confined to the sociological or anthropological “peculiarities of the English” (in the felicitous phrase of Perry Anderson), but instead mobilizes the ethnographic insights of her research as a platform for exploring the social dynamics of empathy, recog- nition, and ethics. In this context of social marginalization and precarious housing, Grohmann discerns how squatters’ practices of appropriating space produce their own sens- es of “home” and “safe space,” and thereby collaborate in constructing moral subjectivities. The book demonstrates that squatting is not reducible to mate- rial deprivation or political disobedience but must also be understood as an ethical practice intended to counteract the traumatic loss of full moral status, or “social death,” which is so pronouncedly evident in the condition of homeless- ness. For homeless people, Grohmann shows, experiences of spatial and social displacement enact specific territorial forms of unequal power and prestige. Consequently, conflicts over legitimate access to, and control of, the physical environment become decisive sites in which to understand and transform the cognitive construction and social production of embodied moral subjectivities in space. By purposefully and defiantly asserting their right to occupy vacant houses and other buildings, the squatters whom we meet in this book not only challenge the sanctity of private property or neoliberal housing policy but also remake themselves and one another as “spatial selves,” as embodied ethical subjects. In other words, what is at stake in their struggles to create practical solutions to the permanent “crisis” of affordable housing and the consequent scourge of home- lessness is a more elemental question of ethics, as they also seek to redress the moral dilemma of how we live and relate to one another within the dominant regime of private property and social life under capitalism. Through their strug- gles for housing, squatters initiate a more fundamental struggle to inhabit and take hold of social space, and thus to make modest but no less daring efforts to remake the world through very localized but determined measures to change their immediate, everyday lived realities. In doing so, they challenge the larger social and political order of neoliberal capitalism, and in working to transform life, they also transform themselves and their relations with the wider society, and engage in new and creative experiments with how we might begin to reor- ganize all of our collective social life. Introduction One cold day in the winter of 1921, Harry Cowley, a chimney sweep from Brighton, decided that enough was enough. A drummer boy in the Royal Navy in his youth, Cowley had been injured at the age of seventeen, and after his recovery, had been redeployed to bury the dead soldiers of World War I. On his return to Brighton, he had found the survivors and their families living in abject poverty in overcrowded slum accommodation or in tents on the local racecourse. Cowley’s patience with this state of affairs ran out the day he found the family of an ex-serviceman camped out in the tent city overlooking town: “I thought; this won’t be allowed to go on, I asked the man ‘are you prepared to go in a house if me and my men find you one’ he said ‘yes’ So we got together our boys and at 3 in the morning under cover of dark we forced our way into an empty house in Cheltenham Place and moved the family in.”1 Cowley proceeded to form a group of local men who began to routinely break into empty properties and move in homeless locals. The group not only lent practical support to the squatter families but also acted as vigilantes to protect the new residents from eviction and violence by landlords or the police. Their actions continued until after World War II, when a new wave of impov- erished and traumatized ex-soldiers returned from the front, to find what in today’s terms could be referred to as a housing bubble. In Cowley’s words: 1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/17/a4212217.shtml. 2 THE EtHICS OF SPACE Well when this last War ended Brighton was loaded with empty houses, yer see. There was a lot of people buying empty houses cheap and selling them or renting at exorbitant prices, people couldn’t afford them., One day I went to do some work in an old ladies home, she saved £400 in her life, her and her husband was old people. I valued the house at £600 and they was being asked £1,600. I thought this don’t come right, your £400 gone up in the air and you’ll never live long enough to buy the place and be secure.2 Cowley’s keen sense of justice made him not only a squatting activist but also a staunch antifascist: “When I read about the brutality to the Jews, any- thing like that, I could cry and have cried. And I felt it was my duty to fight against it.” Fueled by this sense of moral commitment, Cowley and his group fought the rising Far Right in the shape of Oswald Mosley’s “British Union of Fascists”—often physically. Cowley recounts being assaulted and hospital- ized, having his property attacked, and having himself incited violence to shut down local fascist rallies. Asked to justify their actions after one such bloody battle, he replied on behalf of his men: “No mine wasn’t rough boys; they were conscientious.”3 Some ninety years later, Mike Weatherley, Conservative MP for Hove—a place so close to Brighton that nowadays they are considered the same town, Brighton and Hove—launched an entirely different campaign.