Paper short abstract:

I propose the liminal as a vantage point through which residents of a London housing estate undergoing ‘regeneration through demolition’ refuse the displacement, dispossession and racial banishment that accompany it and analyse the limits of a discourse on homeownership and its attendant rights.

Paper long abstract:

The Aylesbury estate, a social housing complex in inner London, has been under regeneration since 1999 and under the threat of demolition since 2005. This “regeneration/demolition regime” has congealed into a semi-permanent condition operating at a peculiar pace where long periods of stasis are punctuated by sudden accelerations of activity. Thus the liminal time-space that residents inhabit is one of uncertain, ongoing suspension - what I call “living within demolition”. This is a temporal and material condition, as infrastructures and financial value are systematically ruined by planned disinvestment. It is also more than that: in this paper I will argue that residents living within demolition enact a politics of refusal (Audra Simpson 2014) through which they disavow the principles of regeneration/demolition, and the dispossession that accompanies it. Residents not only refuse to accept the regeneration/demolition as a fait accompli, they also analyse it as an act of classed and racialised banishment (Ananya Roy 2019) and thus locate it within historical trajectories of colonial and postcolonial violences. In particular here I focus on the collective response of racialised homeowners who are subject to compulsory purchase, and who come to question their status as citizens as they are expelled from the “nation of homeowners” that Thatcher’s government envisaged with the implementation of the 1980 Right to Buy policy. I thus propose the liminal as a vantage point through which residents analyse the limits of a discourse on homeownership and its attendant rights in light of racialised historical trajectories of inhabitation.