WHO CAN AFFORD TO BE HUMAN? Struggling for Affordable Housing in East London

Abstract

In this article I expand contemporary political-economic analyses of housing affordability. Specifically, I engage with urban geography research around biopolitical logics within processes of housing financialization and contribute to debates of ‘making live’ and ‘letting die’ by mobilizing Sylvia Wynter's anticolonial scholarship to emphasize alternative narrations of human life emerging alongside (bio)political-economic rationales that enable the modern human, Man. In this study, which centres on three years of ethnographic research with the Focus E15 housing campaign in the East London borough of Newham, I stress the human as field of political struggle within debates around housing affordability. Situating my research in the struggle of Focus E15 campaigners against the inhuman conditions of Newham's temporary accommodation residents, I reveal how debates around housing affordability within Newham's urban development become constituted through narratives of mixed/balanced communities, the shifting of responsibilities and coproduction efforts. I argue that these debates rely on Man's narrative of homo oeconomicus, which legitimizes the expulsion of temporary accommodation residents from Newham. In contrast, I highlight how the Focus E15 Campaign imagines affordability beyond political-economic rationales, thus spatializing an alternative way of being human, homo narrans. Consequently, I foreground the human as contested grammar within urban geography research on housing affordability to move beyond Man's geographies of managed life and death.