Paper short abstract:

Drawn from long-term participant observation as a liveaboard boater in London, this paper discusses the complexities of marginal, diffuse or itinerant communities’ engagements with urban environmental or conservation initiatives, in light of wider narratives of displacement and spatial injustice.

Paper long abstract:

This paper approaches canals as artefacts of the industrial revolution which, though abandoned following the decline of the industry, were later reimagined, reclaimed, and repurposed as watery ‘commons’ spaces for leisure and dwelling. These re-inhabiting practices have drawn greater interest – and stricter regulation – in the past decade since the popularity of living afloat ballooned alongside London’s austerity-led housing crisis.

It explores how liveaboard boaters respond to environmental initiatives and pollution mitigation measures being set up by Local Authorities, that often result in exclusion from these spaces (for instance, via bans on burning wood to meet clean air targets). In contrast, it sets out a counterexample of a boater-led campaign to hold the Canal and River Trust and Environment Agency to account following their inadequate response to a major pollution incident.

These issues sit within wider narratives of dispossession, of middle class or elite interests hijacking ‘green’ initiatives to ‘clean up’ and thus gentrify or ‘recapitalize’ (per Gandy’s observations on ‘edge spaces’) neighbourhoods. It thinks through Baviskar’s ‘bourgeois environmentalism’ in light of the dwelling practices of a mobile and constantly shifting community of boaters in formerly abandoned - but now increasingly monitored, regulated and monetized - spaces.

It asks what conservation comes to mean in these contexts – who gets to mobilize conservation practices, or environmental awareness more broadly, as justification and validation? How does this play into processes of delegitimization of transient or otherwise informally housed communities? Who is conservation for, who must compromise, and who stands to lose?