Paper short abstract:

Through a series of conjunctures of inhabiting crowded housing among precarious migrants in London and the UK's border towns, this paper develops the notion of spillover to chart the embodied, affective economies, capacities, potentialities and politics of uncrowding life at the limits of property.

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers a series of conjunctures from London and the UK’s coastal border towns to explore the embodied and affective economies, capacities and potentialities of inhabiting densely occupied housing among precarious migrants – from over-crowded rental sublets to repurposed military barracks and hotels in the covid-19 pandemic. The paper offers the conceptual language of ‘spillover’ and a politics of uncrowding to assess these capacities and potentialities at the spatial and ontological limits of property marked by racial, heternormative histories and power-geometries of dispossession (Abourahme 2014; Roy 2017; Lancione 2019). Here, spillover sketches an embodied, affective liminality that is simultaneously bound by and exceeds the ‘cramped space’, containers and volumes of crowded migrant housing while being marked by precarious itineraries of im/mobility (Walters and Lüthi 2016; Sharpe 2016; Simone 2020). The paper traces a politics of uncrowding through multiple potentialities, from acts of refusal and claiming space for one’s self with others in the face of biopolitical and accumulation-driven logics of containment, to radical demands to realign volumetric urbanism from exchange to use value and against state bordering practices.