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Precarity and Public Housing
INTRODUCTION: PRECARITY, TEMPORALITY, AND PUBLIC HOUSING
In 2022, five years after the fire that killed seventy-two people, Grenfell Tower still stands in West London, scaffolded, covered with plastic, and surrounded by hoarding. The hoarding, intended to be a temporary protective measure while a decision was taken on whether to demolish the Tower, has become the site of collective commemoration: the impermanent structure displays messages, photos, and artworks, including a community-created mosaic, which commemorate those who died and confront the systemic injustice that caused the fire to become so destructive.1 Renovation of the building, which was owned by the local government, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and was predominately home to social housing tenants, did not meet legal standards.2 The materials used fed rather than hampered the fire, and residents state that a series of warnings they made about fire safety before the disaster were ignored.3
A recent report by the Grenfell Tower Memorial Commission states that given this history, some of the residents, survivors, and bereaved wish the Tower to remain standing in case "what happened will be forgotten. . . . if Grenfell Tower no longer marks the west London skyline, the general public will think that the tragedy has closure and it's time to move on—and there will be less pressure to deliver justice."4 Others want the Tower demolished for reasons that also have to do with justice and its timeframes. They worry about "how growing up literally in the shadow of the Tower impacts on their children. It's not possible to know how long justice might take, and there are no guarantees that it will ever come."5
Writing years before the Grenfell fire, Owen Hatherley described a particular sense of temporal disjunction associated with social housing, seeing "the council blocks that still stand all over Britain's cities" as the remains "in present-day Britain of the brief rush of Bevanite Socialism that followed the war."6 They are [End Page 13] remnants that recall the utopian ambitions of the postwar welfare state, even as they have degradingly become seen as what Lynsey Hanley calls "holding cages for the poor and disenfranchised," frequently threatened with demolition, privatized, stigmatized in cultural narratives and, as the Grenfell disaster so starkly shows, often poorly maintained by their municipal owners.7
When the dreams of social mobility and reliable security associated with postwar social democracy have become increasingly difficult to believe in, and no new way of imagining future flourishing has emerged, there is, according to Lauren Berlant, a situation of "impasse." The impasse is:
a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things. . . . The holding pattern implied in "impasse" suggests a temporary housing.8
This dossier takes this final sentence, and its connection between housing and the temporal feel of the present, literally. Focusing on European social housing developments, as sites connected both aesthetically and historically with the welfare state and its egalitarian aspirations, it asks how what Hanley terms the "holding cage" and Berlant the "holding pattern" are related and considers the ways artistic mediations of the social housing development register the precarious temporalities of the present.
Although the particularities of housing estates differ in individual national contexts, there are strong continuities—both symbolically and, in terms of design and construction, literally—between developments in different European states.9 Turning to the precarious time implicit in housing places in dialogue several critical approaches that while often expressing adjacent concerns, are rarely discussed together: precariousness as a shared socio-ontological condition, uneven temporalities, and the lived experience within social housing. Guy Standing touches on the confluence of these concepts in his expansive definition of the "precariat," which names the denizens most affected by neoliberalism's dismantling of the welfare state. For Standing, any potential solidarity within the precariat runs against the fragmented temporality that internally divides this "class-in-the-making."10 As the contributors to this special dossier demonstrate, the unresolved tension between a unifying social condition and an alienating temporality is evident in accounts of public housing in contemporary [End Page 14] arts and literature as well. The contributions here foreground individual case studies from across Europe, each of which considers how the politics of social housing—from the people who live there to the material of the buildings themselves—is inextricably linked to the temporality of the impasse.
Outside of Scandinavia, Denmark is often seen as a welfare-state utopia. For observers inside the country, however, this narrative calls for more nuance.11 Jon Helt Haarder's contribution takes the form of a fragmentary autobiography, rather than a general overview of the Danish welfare state, to untangle his ambivalent attachments to that social model. Turning to England, Benjamin Kohlmann examines Christopher Ian Smith's documentary film New Town Utopia (2018), which features the residents of Basildon, a postwar new town. Drawing from Berlant's account of precarity's "ongoing now," Kohlmann calls attention to the fractured sense of the present that characterizes the estate's residents.12 This sense of fragmentation informs Mathies G. Aarhus's essay, which considers the poetry of British-Nigerian poet Caleb Femi. In Poor (2020), Aarhus writes, Femi demonstrates how the lyric form accommodates the diverse stories and temporalities that gather in and around specific housing sites. Finally, Adrian Anagnost extends our consideration of postwar public housing to the ersatz shelters constructed in response to the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe. In the case of Berlin, Anagnost decries an architecture of indeterminacy that locks asylum seekers into spatial, as well as temporal, states of tenuousness.
The range of these contributions investigates precarious time as it is indexed by European social housing and clarifies both the long durée of postwar precarization as well its rapid acceleration after the 2007 recession. In addition to treating public housing developments as sites that both situate and give rise to artistic production in multiple genres and identifying some of the literary and artistic works that contend with a post-welfare Europe, this dossier also poses important questions for responding to precarization more generally. As the temporary memorial at Grenfell demonstrates, the temporality attached to public housing—its disputed past and uncertain future—generates strong, if divergent, public responses. These papers therefore work toward building a critical dialogue—drawing from precarity studies, accounts of austerity, and contemporary artistic forms—that rejects the stigmatization of public housing by stressing the heterogeneity not only of the experiences there but of the temporalities that shape those experiences. [End Page 15]
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Rosenhill Revisited
I went back to Ohio, Chrissie Hynde intones in my head over the tough iconic bass line of one of my favorite Pretenders songs, but my city was gone.1 For my own part, I have more modestly gone back to the housing estate where I spent some of my early childhood, but part of the house we had lived in is in fact missing. And all the low, gray Brutalist blocks scattered over the green field sloping toward the railway have been re-covered, some in shiny white; others are now organically brown. Caught in the middle, Joni Mitchell takes over, Carol, we're middle class, we're middle aged.2 I am no Carol, but it's true: I'm decidedly middle aged and middle class, as I linger in front of what used to be my block and my stairway. This is, however, not a story of class traveling. Not because I am not middle class, but because I was never anything else. No upward social mobility whatsoever on my part, or downward for that matter.
It was all according to plan that my parents—my mother, a schoolteacher, and my father, someone who would eventually become a university professor of literature—moved into block 3 of "Rosenhill" (Rosenhøj, in Danish) on the southern outskirts of Denmark's second largest city, Aarhus. They had come from small rural villages to study; now she was working while he slowly made his way into academia. I was born in 1963, my brother two years later. By 1968, the photo I am looking at while writing this was taken: my brother and I looking out from our balcony over a huge construction site where immense yellow cranes seem to be pulling blocks just like our own out of the mud.
Renovated blocks of flats and green areas in between them, Rosenhøj, Aarhus 2017. Photo by Renoveringsprisen.
Like the rest of Europe, Denmark was fixing its housing shortage and coping with the baby boom by constructing areas of modernist mass housing in the suburbs. The flats of Rosenhill were large and filled with light—they contained all the amenities—and the area was designed to cater for both the working class moving out of run-down inner-city housing and people like my own family. A few years later, my mother's wealthy cousin Tage would explain to my parents that they should take advantage of Denmark's changing housing policy, which favored house ownership over [End Page 17] renting. And so, like many other middle-class people and the affluent part of the working class, they did what cousin Tage recommended. In 1972, they bought a detached house with a garden, and we, much to the shock and horror of my brother and me, left our rented flat in a modernist housing estate. We also left all the children we had played with there, on the large lawns between the blocks, not to mention the alluring, forbidden, and muddy areas of the construction sites.
This is how Danish architect Marie Bruun Yde sums up the development I witnessed as a child—with reference to another housing project, Urbanplanen in Copenhagen:
Like most of the country's social housing districts, Urbanplanen underwent a structural crisis up through the 1970s and 1980s. The boom in the construction of detached houses elsewhere enabled many resourceful tenants to move out and municipal housing allocation practices and substantial rent-subsidies for low-income families further contributed to the demographic imbalance of these areas by creating a geographic concentration of socially marginalized groups.3
Yde's narrative would seem to explain why the new concrete blocks received a rather bad reputation almost overnight—and the story it relates is in fact surprisingly similar in very different national contexts.4 In the early 1980s, both the UK and France witnessed urban rioting: in Brixton in 1981 and in Lyon in 1983. This raised what has been termed "La nouvelle question urbaine," the new urban question, which concerns the fact that some areas of European metropoles had become the spatial expression of social exclusion.5 Paradoxically, the combination of high levels of unemployment and large proportions of immigrants was especially pertinent in social housing areas—otherwise thought of as the crux of welfare state housing policy.
Roughly speaking, answers to the question of problem-stricken European social housing areas have taken two forms, aligned with the general difference between left and right.6 Socialist and social democratic governments have favored holistic conceptions of the problem and have aimed at reintegration and local empowerment as solutions. For liberal governance, the problems originate in the habits and morals of the inhabitants, and solutions have aimed at developing personal and local responsibility through a combination of marketization and authoritarian disciplinary measures. In a UK context, this approach has led to enhanced social segregation; housing estates have become, as Lynsey Hanley put it, "holding cages for the poor and disenfranchised."7
Given this course of events, it is not surprising that estates' modernist blocks came to symbolize the persistence of social problems in affluent welfare states. However, several commentators have pointed out that a narrative such as Yde's is only part of the story. The changes taking place in the areas themselves cannot explain why and how modernist mass housing so [End Page 18] quickly came to epitomize the exact opposite of what it had symbolized the night before—segregation, poverty, anomie, depression, violence, hopelessness, and terrible conditions for growing up. Swedish professor of ethnography Per-Markku Ristilammi uses the term "dark poetry" to describe the linguistic and visual discourse emerging around the Rosengård estate in Malmö and other housing estates under the Swedish "Million programme." German historian Christiane Reinecke speaks of a "semantics of crisis" in Germany and France.8 "Having been intimately connected with the future social order of the Danish welfare society in the 1950s and 1960s," Danish historian Mikkel Høghøj concludes, "modernist mass housing now signified the social backsides of this societal vision, representing economic, social, and cultural crises."9
Obviously, there were always problems in housing estates like Rosenhill and Urbanplanen. However, from 1970s and onward, inhabitants of housing estates in Denmark as elsewhere in Europe faced not only very real social problems, but their homes also became symbolic containers for general anxieties in the larger community, not least, in the longer run, anxieties concerning immigrants. From there, it is only a short leap to making housing estates and their inhabitants the cause of the problems.
In Denmark, the larger context is a still functioning welfare state of the Nordic universal model. However, the anti-ghettoization strategy passed in 2018 and modified in 2021 follows the area-based logic in which inhabitants are seen as the core of the social problems. This strategy is based on annually updated lists of housing areas experiencing particular "problems": When certain levels of crime, unemployment, non-Western ethnicity (!), low wages, and lack of education have been reached, a package of sticks and carrots is introduced so that the housing association responsible for the housing area in question can change the mix of people inhabiting the estate, attract new types of tenants and keep them in the area, and help inhabitants having problems.10 The definitions and the focus on area-based interventions are not strictly research-based but seem to be founded in a "political assessment."11
The contentious word "ghetto" was removed from the strategy in the revision of 2021 and supplanted with the term parallelsamfund, "parallel society." Even so, that non-Western ethnicities are treated as a problem to be fixed alongside social problems is obviously highly problematic and might recall the headline of an editorial in The Guardian commenting on the original 2018 version of the plan: "This cannot end well."12 The fundamental issue here is mounting social inequality leading to enhanced geographical segregation, and studies in a Danish context do not support the use of ethnicity as a criterion in targeting the social consequences of this problem.13
However, some of the local renovation plans sometimes do make a positive difference. In Rosenhill, a large renovation plan has changed the area and its blocks—including the one I had lived in, the one I am looking at now—with [End Page 19] favorable results for crime prevention and inhabitants' feeling of security.14 Such results accord with a study of the genealogy of the Danish anti-ghettoization policymaking since the 1990s.15 The study concludes that the present strategy does have some roots in the area-based rationale whereby social problems are treated as problems caused by inhabitants, which should be mended by discipline and marketization, and thus represents a dismantling of the ideals behind public housing as a concrete expression (and an expression in concrete) of the egalitarian ideals of the welfare state itself. The point of the study is, however, that the overall picture is more complex: the strategy has in fact also retained elements of the holistic approach aiming at welfare and redistribution.
Renovated blocks of flats and green areas in between them, Rosenhøj, Aarhus 2017.
Renovated blocks of flats in Rosenhøj seen from a park-like area. Rosenhøj, Aarhus 2017. Photo by Renoveringsprisen.
So, where am I, what am I looking at, what is Rosenhill? The ruins of a no longer functioning welfare state, an example of Marc Augé's "nonplace," a specimen of Foucault's famous heterotopia, possibly a heterotopia of deviation "in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed"?16 Maybe I am eying, in reality and real-time, a Bakhtinian chronotope signifying the precarious temporality of the neoliberal epoch?17 Over the last decade, Denmark has witnessed a surge of literature dealing with growing up in housing estates. The poems of Yahya Hassan and Haidar Ansari and novels such as Morten Pape's—literary testimonies of childhoods very different from my own decades earlier—certainly make the last two proposals of the heterotopia and the chronotope worth considering.18
What I would suggest, though, is that if we really want to break with [End Page 20] a long and rather grim history, maybe middle-class noninhabitants should try not turning estates and concrete blocks into symbolic containers for whatever societal change we want to conceptualize. Housing estates are very different from each other, and it is well worth remembering that the majority of them are peaceful living quarters for people living lives not markedly different from those who own their own houses or rent privately.19 Moreover, individual estates are also typically culturally heterogenous, and despite the marked influence of neoliberal conceptions of inhabitants' "parallel culture" being the root of social problems, the welfare state has never abandoned the holistic approach completely.
Blocks of flats in Rosenhøj, renovated in organic brown, a new playgrown in the foreground. Rosenhøj, Aarhus 2017. Photo by Renoveringsprisen.
The fact that some of the renovation plans do make a positive difference makes me think about the passage in Urban Outcasts, where Loïc Wacquant points out that the rumors of the death of the nation state are greatly exaggerated. He also stresses the continued power of European welfare states to counter the effects of "advanced marginality" (not despite, but because they are also in part responsible for them).20 One Danish commentator argues that Guy Standing underestimates the power of Nordic welfare regimes to counter the effects of precarization of labor.21 In a similar vein, declaring the death of the welfare state in a European context, even with a concerned face, risks functioning as a self-fulfilling prophecy in the service of a neoliberal ambition to make it come true.
So if I were to make a general claim (and in doing so start another round of symbolization, perhaps), I would suggest that Danish housing estates are diverse and central rather than monolithic and peripheral.
They express the core ideals of the universal welfare model on which the country was built, and they ought to be recognized as an important part of recent history. Moreover, the very real social problems facing inhabitants in some of the more disadvantaged housing areas are anything but marginal phenomena since they have to do with the general concerns of the whole of the country. Standing in front of my old block, I am looking at a future new normal: Denmark in a multicultural condition, with all its challenges, ambivalences, conflicts—and potentials.22 [End Page 21]
JON HELT HAARDER is Associate Professor of Danish literature at the Department for the Study of Culture at University of Southern Denmark (SDU). He has published numerous articles and book chapters, as well as books on a variety of subjects within the fields of Scandinavian literature and literary theory. He was part of the SDU project Uses of Literature: The Social Dimensions of Literature, headed by Rita Felski, 2016–2021. Presently, he is the PI of the project "Reassembling the Ghetto," funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark, 2021–2024.
Notes
. This article is related to the project "Reassembling the Ghetto", funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark 2019-2024, grant no. 1024-00070B.
1. Pretenders, "My City Was Gone," Learning to Crawl, Sire, 1984, compact disc.
2. Joni Mitchell, "Chinese Cafe," Wild Things Run Fast, Geffen, 1982, compact disc.
3. Marie Bruun Yde, "Under the Bazar, the Concrete! Urbanplanen Then, Now, and in the Future," in SOUP: A Temporary Art and Architecture Project in UrbanPlanen, ed. Marie Bruun Yde et al. (Copenhagen: Vandkunsten, 2009), 28.
4. Claus Bech-Danielsen and Marie Stender, Fra Ghetto til blandet by: Danske og internationale erfaringer med omdannelse af udsatte boligområder (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2017).
5. Jacques Donzelot, "La nouvelle question urbaine," Esprit, November 1999, https://esprit.presse.fr/article/jacques-donzelot/la-nouvelle-question-urbaine-9749.
6. Martin Severin Frandsen and Jesper Visti Hansen, "Parallelsamfundspakkens genealogi," Dansk sociologi 31, no. 1 (2020): 8–30.
7. Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History (London: Granta Books, 2012), 11.
8. Per-Markku Ristilammi, Rosengård och den svarta poesien: En studie av moderna annorlundahet (Stockholm: B. Östlings Bökforlag, 1994); Christiane Reinecke, "Auf dem Weg zu einer neuen sozialen Frage? Ghettoisierung und Segregation als Teil einer Krisensemantik der 1970er Jahre," Informationen zur modernen Stadtgeschichte, no. 2 (2012): 110–31; Christiane Reinecke, "Localising the Social: The Rediscovery of Urban Poverty in Western European 'Affluent Societies,'" in "Urban Societies in Europe," ed. Moritz Föllmer and Mark B. Smith, special issue, Contemporary European History 24, no. 4 (November 2015): 555–76.
9. Mikkel Høghøj, "Between Utopia and Dystopia: A Socio-cultural History of Modernist Mass Housing in Denmark, c. 1945-1985" (PhD diss., Aarhus University, 2019), 267.
10. See the latest versions of the lists here: "Liste over parallelsamfund pr. 1. december 2022," Indenrigs-og Boligministeriet, https://im.dk/Media/638054017996341610/Parallelsamfundslisten%202022.pdf. The results of the plans induced by the general strategy—called "Parallelsamfundsaftalen," the agreement concerning parallel societies—is monitored by a group of scholars. They publish their findings at: https://xn—udsatteomrder-yfb.dk.
11. Gunvor Christensen, "Kommer Parallelsamfundsaftalen til at have betydning for social ulighed og segregering på boligmarkedet?," Samfundsøkonomen, no. 3 (August 2020): 24, https://doi.org/10.7146/samfundsokonomen.v0i3.122591.
12. "The Guardian View on Forcible Integration in Denmark: This Cannot End Well," The Guardian, July 8, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/08/the-guardian-view-on-forcible-integration-in-denmark-this-cannot-end-well.
13. Christensen, "Kommer Parallelsamfundsaftalen," 23
14. The results of the transformation of Rosenhøj are documented in Helle Nørgaard and Signe Rudå, Fysisk omdannelse I udsatte boligområder: En undersøgelse om at styrke beboernes tryghed og forebygge kriminalitet (Aalborg, Denmark: Institut for Byggeri, By og Miljø, 2021), https://build.dk/Pages/Fysisk-omdannelse-i-udsatte-boligomraader.aspx. The largest transformation plan in Denmark is the one underway in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest town. The project has English language webpages explaining its principles and results: https://helhedsplangellerup.dk/english.
15. Frandsen and Hansen, "Parallelsamfundspakkens genealogi."
16. Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (1992; London: Verso, 1995); Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," trans. Jay Miskowiec, diacritics 16, no.1 (Spring 1986): 25.
17. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992).
18. Yahya Hassan, Yahya Hassan (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2013); Yahya Hassan, Yahya Hassan 2 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2019); Haidar Ansari, Institutionaliseret (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2022); Morten Pape, Planen (Copenhagen: Politikens forlag, 2015). I have argued elsewhere that housing estates have an as-yet untold literary history: Jon Helt Haarder, "The Precariat as Place: A Literary History of the Danish Ghetto," Scandinavica 59, no. 2, (2020), https://www.scandinavica.net/article/18832-the-precariat-as-place-a-literary-history-of-the-danish-ghetto.
19. Norwegian Øyvind Holen's Getto: En historie om norske drabantbyer (Oslo: Res publica, 2021) is dedicated to the 97% of estate residents who have never been in trouble with the police but whose homes and neighborhoods face stigmatization because of the actions of a very small group. See Holen, Getto, 7.
20. See Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008), section 3, chapter 9.
21. Irene Odgaard, "Prekarisering i Europa: bidrag til en konceptualisering," Tidsskrift for Arbejdsliv 20, no. 1 (2018): 64–84, https://doi.org/10.7146/tfa.v20i1.108198.
22. Anna Meera Gaonkar et al., eds., Postmigration: Art, Culture, and Politics in Contemporary Europe (Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag, 2021).
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Thatcherism's Ongoing Now
The worst part of the dream is that when I wake up,I find that Maggie Thatcher is still alive.
—Arnold Wesker1
This dossier takes its cue partly from Lauren Berlant's observations about the "ongoing now" of precariousness.2 In Cruel Optimism (2011), they mobilize this category to describe the lived experience of a present in which the stability of existing forms of life is hollowed out through heightened exposure to [End Page 23] socioeconomic vulnerability. According to Berlant, the aesthetic correlate of this precarious temporality is "the waning of genre": whereas genres ordinarily "provide an affective expectation of the experience of watching something unfold," the waning of genre occurs when life feels permanently truncated because the promise of a fulfilled life is withheld or rendered unattainable.3 Building on these observations, Berlant also gives some attention to the infrastructural conditions that used to support collective assumptions about what constitutes a good life—and while they do not discuss public housing, it is clear that public housing has played a key role in the welfarist imaginaries of many countries (including Britain). Indeed, it wouldn't be too much to say that postwar narratives about public housing display a recognizable generic logic of their own: following the aspirational idealism of the postwar years (so the story goes), when public housing was seen to usher in a bright new age of collectivism and civic engagement, the right-to-buy policy introduced under Margaret Thatcher led to the rapid dismantling of that earlier promise by allowing public housing to be sold on the private market.
Is there a particular generic logic—however disjunctive or broken—that registers the crisis of public housing in Thatcherism's long wake? Christopher Ian Smith's documentary, New Town Utopia (2018), offers some answers to this question. The film depicts the history of Basildon, a post-1945 model town in Essex. Like other so-called new towns that were built in the UK after World War II, Basildon was purposefully planned and developed, and it attracted young couples and families hoping to escape the congested living conditions in neighboring London. Through interviews with individuals who grew up in Basildon in the 1960s and '70s and who decided to stay there, the film paints a more checkered picture of the new town movement than is suggested by the popular narrative of the rise and demise of Britain's welfare state.
Two interlinked narratives emerge from New Town Utopia. The first points to the internal faults that were built into the new town movement's top-down spirit of paternalistic authoritarianism. For example, the opening shots of Basildon are overlaid with the words of a House of Commons speech by Lewis Silkin, the Minister of Town and Country Planning in Clement Attlee's first postwar Labor government: "I believe we may well produce a new type of citizen," Silkin declared to parliament in 1946. "A healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture, and civic pride. In the long run, that will be the real test."4 In sharp contrast to this unabashedly paternalistic vision of social engineering, the voices of the interviewees inform viewers about the long-term effects—notably social fragmentation and the resultant increase in substance abuse and drug dealing—that were produced by the uprooting of local London communities. "We're governed," one voice records, "by very wise people who have this amazing talent of knowing what's good for people a level or two levels below them. So when they come up with an [End Page 24] idea like [Basildon] it is aimed at something they're not."5 Yet while New Town Utopia unsettles nostalgic myths that have crystallized around Britain's postwar moment, this does not mean that Smith is simply hostile to the period's urban planning projects: to the contrary, the film repeatedly makes clear that the new towns' structural problems only became apparent when Thatcher's right-to-buy policy effected the fracturing and economic collapse of communities such as Basildon as well as the brutal defunding of the cooperative social and artistic initiatives that had taken root there.
Berlant explains that for artists faced with the waning of genres, "[t]he urgency is to reinvent, from the scene of survival, new idioms of the political"—to improvise with the fragments that remain and to forge new genres.6 However, as New Town Utopia reminds us, the genres that are most readily available in the wake of the collapse of an older progressive utopianism are precisely the ones instituted by the new (neoliberal) politico-economic regime. These new genres include upward mobility narratives that lend support to a dubiously individualist ethos of achievement and merit—producing stories about people who "made it" by escaping from the dilapidated ruins of postwar urbanist experiments like Basildon.
As New Town Utopia progresses, the film's attention shifts to interviews with (and performances from) the town's visual artists, poets, and musicians. The most famous band to emerge from Basildon in the 1980s, Depeche Mode, is only mentioned briefly, yet the band's global success and slick synth-pop aesthetic is present enough to invite a contrast with the patient and drudging artistic labor of the artists that are featured more prominently in Smith's film. The language of bootstrapping self-reliance that has surrounded most of Depeche Mode's public pronouncements about Basildon is legible without too much cynicism as a version of the Thatcherite language of enterprising self-help: "We started very young," lead singer Dave Gahan recalls, "and thank God, because I'd probably be digging ditches in Basildon right now. We dug our way out of that town."7 "I really hated Basildon," the band's principal songwriter Martin Gore adds: "I wanted to get out as quickly as I could. . . . It's one of those places where you go drinking because that's your only option."8 The generic mode that is called up here is that of the determinedly forward-looking upward mobility narrative—a genre that focuses on successful escapes from precarity rather than on the exacting immersion in precarity's ongoing now. By contrast, New Town Utopia introduces us to a lesser-known set of Basildon artists: Joe Hymas, the manager of the town's community center for the arts, an institution suffering from chronic defunding; the painter Alan Joyce, who died from drug-related liver failure and whose explicit and visually intense art includes canvasses scratched with a syringe; Terry Bird, the producer of a horror film set in Basildon's run-down public estates; and Steve Waters, creator of "Old Man Stan," a puppet character who vituperates tirelessly against the [End Page 25] narrow-minded philistinism of (local) government. These figures represent different responses to precarity-struck Basildon, ranging from self-conscious attempts to come to terms with a biographical sense of being stuck to trenchantly aggressive anti-neoliberal satire. Thatcherism's shadow looms inescapably over these artists.
Berlant discovers a cautious future-directed optimism that emerges from the waning of genre—an opportunity, however precarious, to "reinvent, from the scene of survival, new idioms of the political." The interstitial, improvisational work of the artists we meet in Smith's film upends this forward-looking impulse. In contrast to the wry, cartoonish, and sometimes ironically cheerful "art of failure" that scholars such as Berlant or Jack Halberstam associate with the genre-resistant arts of the present, Basildon's artists give us wistful, angry, and hurt reckonings with a precarious present that seems irremediably broken.9 These artists do not offer art as a salve. Instead, they articulate the waning of genre as a still-unfolding process, as the sign of a festering social wound: their politicized aesthetic involves a mobilization of anger and disappointment—a determined bid to dwell inside the brokenness and disorientation of Thatcherism's ongoing now. [End Page 26]
BENJAMIN KOHLMANN teaches English literature at the University of Regensburg, Germany. He is the author of British Literature and the Life of Institutions: Speculative States (Oxford UP, 2021), Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s (Oxford UP, 2014) and articles in PMLA, ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Novel, and elsewhere. With Matthew Taunton, he is editing The People: Exclusion, Belonging, and Democracy for Cambridge University Press. He is also working on a study of the global history of the socialist bildungsroman, 1820–2020.
Notes
. I am grateful to the Heisenberg Programme of the German Research Foundation for funding research relating to this piece.
1. Arnold Wesker, Beorthel's Hill: A Play for Basildon (1989).
2. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 196.
3. Ibid., 6.
4. New Town Utopia, directed by Christopher Ian Smith (2017; London: Verve Pictures, 2020), DVD.
5. Ibid.
6. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 262.
7. Depeche Mode, "'We're Dysfunctional. Maybe That's What Makes Us Tick,'" interview by Dorian Lynskey, The Guardian, March 28, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/mar/28/depeche-mode-interview-delta-machine-dysfunc-tional.
8. Martin Gore, quoted in Jonathan Miller, Stripped: Depeche Mode (London: Omnibus Press, 2009), 14.
9. See Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
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Psychogeography on the Council Estate
Following the publication of his debut collection, Poor (2020), British-Nigerian poet Caleb Femi described his work as psychogeography from a South London council estate: "It was psychogeography that was at the heart of the collection. It was an investigation into . . . what structural powers have molded the conditions that have festered so much sorrow . . . so much lacking . . . and all the dark things that come with living in an impoverished area."1 With this essay, I want to explore psychogeography as both a poetics and a method for understanding the history of a site. Unlike architecture, poetry is not first and foremost a spatial artform, although (admittedly) some concrete and visual poetries define themselves as figural rather than referential. Most poets, however, consider their building material to be language, rather than anything principally physical. What, then, are the affordances of poetry in the psychogeographical study of the affects of urban space on our psyches?
"Psychogeography" is a term that has been revived in the last few decades by writers like Will Self, Patrick Keiller, and Iain Sinclair.2 However, more recent works depoliticize psychogeography and use it simply as a way to describe writing that mixes psychology and geography, neglecting the term's original meaning as an activist strategy used in "the groping search for a new way of life."3 Many recent psychogeographic texts focus on the subjective, claiming a kind of resistance inherent in the individual experience of space. For instance, Sinclair's writings can be understood as a personal counternarrative to Thatcher's financialization of London "establishing marginal spaces and histories discovered on foot as sanctuaries that tell of a profound cultural and social loss."4 While some psychogeographies focus on the individual, others examine the collective affiliations of groups and classes to urban space.5
As an example of the latter, Femi uses psychogeography to explore how British postwar housing schemes shape the minds and identities of a group of socially marginalized people: the "boys from the endz." In this way, Poor lays out an affective history of British postwar housing from the perspective of its residents. At the heart of Poor is a place: North Peckham, the council estate where Femi grew up in the 1990s. North Peckham was an enormous Brutalist estate in South London with over 1,400 homes sardined into sixty-five multistory blocks.6 The estate was torn down in 2000 after the fatal stabbing of Damilola Taylor, a ten-year-old boy whom Femi knew personally. Shaped like a mixed-media collection, Poor combines poems with photography and bits of language that would be significant [End Page 27] to a young boy growing up in a council estate, including quotes from television interviews with urban planners, R&B songs, Modernist poetry, and grime lyrics.
Poor's interest in psychogeography is shaped by Femi's desire to map out the multifaceted nature of a place and its various influences on its youth. In interviews, Femi has described North Peckham, with great nostalgia, as a giant "international space station" that constituted his entire world as a child.7 The postwar British council estate was designed in this way to contain everything needed for the residents to thrive: urban squares, communal gatherings, football pitches, shops, arcades, laundromats, and more.8 Despite Femi's fond childhood memories, North Peckham was also a site of tragedy: the senseless killing of a childhood acquaintance and the poet's first encounter with racism and poverty. Undoubtedly the product of a well-meaning architect's vision, the sheer abundance of North Peckham often led to an atmosphere of enclosure and exclusion for the residents living there. Femi has spoken elsewhere about the disconnect between the intention behind much British public housing and its social effects, which he believes became even more apparent in the aftermath of the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster, where combustible cladding, which should have insulated and protected residents, worked to spread the tragic fire that caused seventy-two deaths.9
Who brought these here (1999). Photograph by Caleb Femi.
As a psychogeographical history of the council estate, Poor interrogates what happens when lofty ideals clash with grim social realities. The [End Page 28] design of Brutalist mega-estates like North Peckham causes its residents to feel hidden from the gaze of the British public imprisoned in a world shut away from the rest of society. As one poem bluntly asks: "Is this what the architect had in mind? / A paradise of affordable bricks, tucked under / a blanket, shielded from the world . . . yet / the devil found good ground to plough his seeds."10 But estates both shut in and shut out. On the one hand, the confinement of North Peckham resulted in the residents feeling that the outside world was not for them; on the other hand, it entailed a sense of belonging or being "tucked under / a blanket, shielded from the world."11 As a result, the psychological responses of the residents often appear multifaceted and contradictory, as the estate alternates between being a prison and a protector from outside threats.
Poor not only interrogates the individual experiences of residents but expands its gaze to a group of "boys from the endz." Many of the poems—including the five-part series "Concrete" and the title poem "Poor"—investigate the shared identity shaped by urban living and youth culture and seek out the collectivity fostered by estate life. In British media, Black estate boys are often either demonized via images of thugs or threatening young men or romanticized via street culture or hip-hop music. Femi is eager to avoid both demonization and romanticism, and he has described his representative strategy as an attempt to "police the imagination" of the reader to avoid stereotypes.12
Gloucester Estate. Still from short film And They Knew Light (2017), directed by Caleb Femi.
Nonetheless, many of the poems in Poor represent estate boyhood as shaped by rage and feelings of being in opposition to the world. One poem, for instance, uses second person to tell the story of a violent stabbing: "You will question if you have always been / an empty cove waiting to be filled by another boy's rage."13 Here, rage is represented as a contagious affect spilling from one boy to the next. Like a stabbing, rage is transferred from boy to boy through the affective community of the estate. In another poem, the estate is even compared to a "system of nerves" that connects each of its residents in a giant web.14 There is a glimmer of optimism in this metaphor as the residents are imagined as belonging to the same breathing organism. The material grounds of the estate—interconnected pavements, closed blocks, shared common areas—foster a sense of community and fellow-feeling for those [End Page 29] sharing the space. But the interconnectedness of the residents also makes it difficult for the individual to find shelter from hardship and sorrow.
As a result, the estate boys often construct their common identity in opposition to the world beyond the grounds by actively embracing an outsider status. Indeed, the collectivity that emerges seems to be a kind of collectivity in spite where the estate represents a symbol of pride because it is despised by the rest of society. Or as one poem goes: "Learn to love what everyone sees as ugly."15 In Poor, the common identity formed in the council estate results in a kind of aestheticization of the ugly, which finds its clearest expression in the work's descriptions of concrete.
Like much postwar fiction depicting the council estate, Poor uses concrete as a recurring symbol for the rough and grimy life in an impoverished area.16 As scholars have argued, in the postwar period, concrete developed into the dominant metaphor for marginalized urban areas, and the cultural history of concrete follows the changing associations connected to the urban working class.17 Once a futuristic building material associated with progress, and even democracy, concrete can be understood as the material canvas on which the social history of the post-war period was painted.18
Shoutout to us Boys who play out here (2012). Photograph by Caleb Femi.
In physical terms, however, concrete is a complex building material consisting of a mix of various components: cement, aggregates (like sand or small pebbles), and several minerals and admixtures. Concrete is indeed not one thing but an organic material interacting with its surroundings. Poor thematizes this variable and ambiguous nature of concrete as one poem, for instance, is a recipe of all the ingredients that make up the estate grounds:
INGREDIENTS: cement, sand, tooth of lion, unplucked iris of Saturday, what we will soon come to know as soil, three boys' pact to never forget, dust of vibranium, whispers of the old city, vibration of praise & worship, [End Page 30] multicultural London English, debris of a false wall through which black rabbits once vanished, blubber-rich bubblegum, half a blem, milk of magnesia, Grime music, yellow police tape, clingfilm, two truths about death, spilt gourmet kale-and-spinach juice, spilt Supermalt, flakes of beef patty, calcium, batter of a Morley's chicken, bleach.19
Like concrete, life in a council estate is a composite experience, and as a result, the figural language used to describe North Peckham ranges from grimy to delicate. In a poem simply titled "Concrete (III)," the exterior of the estate is described as the "lining of a womb / that holds boys / . . . soft as a meadow might a lamb."20 While concrete is the hard exterior that isolates the council estate from the rest of society, it also creates a protective "womb" or armor for its residents. As another poem goes: "When everyone called me son of a shadow / it was concrete that called me proof of light." The rough surface of the council estate simultaneously becomes a mirror that casts back the struggles of its residents and proof of their perseverance and humanity.
As an example of psychogeography, Poor reveals how a place—along with its smallest building blocks such as concrete, cladding, and pavement—fosters social marginalization but also various forms of solidarity. We should learn to listen to what places like the council estate tell us. Even when the story is a rough one, the concrete facade contains much proof of light. [End Page 31]
MATHIES G. AARHUS is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie post-doctoral fellow at the University of Gothenburg. His research investigates the relationship between literature and work. He has written articles on literature and work-related issues like deindustrialization, precarization, and automation. He is currently writing a book on the literary history of unemployment.
Notes
1. Caleb Femi, "Psychogeography: Poor with Caleb Femi," interview with Sarah Ozo-Irabor, Books & Rhymes: The Podcast, podcast audio, November 9, 2020, https://booksandrhymes.com/psychogeography-poor-with-caleb-femi.
2. This interest in situated writing is matched by a turn to "site-specific readings" in literary studies. See David J. Alworth, Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
3. For Guy Debord and the Situationists, the "study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment . . . on the emotions" was a way to defamiliarize everyday life, rendering it susceptible to radical change. Guy Debord, "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography," trans. Ken Knabb, Les lèvres nues 6, no. 2 (September 1955), https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/geography.html. See also Amy J. Elias, "Psychogeography, Détournement, Cyberspace," in "What Is an Avant-Garde?," ed. Jonathan P. Eburne and Rita Felski, special issue, New Literary History 41, no. 4 (Autumn 2010): 821–45.
4. Alastair Bonnett, "The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography," Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 1 (January 2009): 47.
5. More recently, the politicized version of psychogeography has been usefully revived in British literature with an eye to postwar processes of gentrification, precarization, and subalternity. See Nick Bentley, "'Why Should You Go Out?': Encountering the City in Monica Ali's Brick Lane," in Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the City, Magali Cornier Michael, ed. (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 15–33.
6. See Alexander Clement, Brutalism: Post-War British Architecture (Ramsbury, UK: The Crowood Press, 2018).
7. Caleb Femi, "Poor with Caleb Femi," interview with Bilal, Kwaku, Patrick, and Tom, Over the Bridge Podcast, podcast audio, October 19, 2020, https://podtail.com/podcast/overthebridgepodcast/over-the-bridge-episode-65-poor-with-caleb-femi.
8. See John Boughton, Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing (London: Verso, 2018).
9. Femi, "Psychogeography."
10. Caleb Femi, Poor (London: Penguin, 2020), 13.
11. Ibid., 13.
12. Robert Kazandjian, "' In Any Circumstance, Humans Need Imagination in Order to Survive': An Interview with Caleb Femi," Complex UK, November 19, 2020, https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2020/11/caleb-femi-interview.
13.
14. Ibid., 13.
15. Ibid., 129.
16. Susanne Cuevas, "'Societies Within': Council Estates as Cultural Enclaves in Recent Urban Fictions," in Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film and the Arts, ed. Lars Eckstein et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 383–95.
17. See Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History (London: Reaktion Books, 2013).
18. Today, concrete continues to carry significant metaphorical weight as developing nations often associate the material with modernization, while environmental movements criticize the material for its huge carbon footprint that accounts for around 8% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. See Mary Soderstrom, Concrete: From Ancient Origins to a Problematic Future (Saskatchewan: University of Regina Press, 2020).
19. Femi, Poor.
20. Ibid.
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Antisocial Housing:Migration and Temporary Architectures in Berlin
Refugees, asylum seekers, and economic migrants occupy spaces of uncertainty, their bodily presences marked as dubiously legal. They experience temporal uncertainty too, including bursts of immediacy and indefinite waiting.1
Housing for refugees and migrants often displays this same sense of permanent temporariness, constructed in bursts during times of crisis and with legal status remaining unresolved. This would seem distinct from the history of social housing in Europe, since social rights in the European Union—including the [End Page 32] right to housing—are generally defined as a durable social good granted on the basis of citizenship.2 Yet a broader understanding of social housing includes all government-sponsored housing, including temporary and ersatz shelters for refugees.
In post-austerity Europe, perhaps the most visible manifestation of social housing's temporality came in 2015, when over a million people fled war, violence, and privation in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, and entered Europe in hopes of resettlement. Government-sponsored housing for these newcomers drew on post-disaster shelters, tent camps, shipping container homes, and midcentury social housing. These design aesthetics, and the relationships between the structures and cityscapes, visually mark housing for migrants and refugees as intentionally and overtly provisional.
Streetview of future site of Tempohomes, Alte Jakobstraße, Berlin, 2008. Imagery ©2022 Google.
MAKING (TEMPORARY) HEIMAT
In contemporary Berlin, millions of euros are spent on forms of refugee housing that overtly declare their temporariness.3 Most famously, in 2015, the former Tempelhof airport was adapted to house asylum seekers. Indoor fabric tents and, later, ceiling-less prefabricated dividers partitioned the space into noise-permeable cubicles. The sense of the inhabitants' temporary status is visible in the forms of shelters—fabric or plastic walls, lumber or metal pipe bunk beds—even as enclosure within the Tempelhof airport building concealed so-called newcomers from the surrounding city.4
In 2015 and 2016, as housing needs grew, the city of Berlin funded construction of nearly two dozen "container villages" of Tempohomes on public lands (Figs. 1-4), mandated to [End Page 33]
Future site of Tempohomes, Alte Jakobstraße, Berlin, 2017. Text reads: "Here arises a Tempohome—an accommodation for the temporary housing of refugees/ Builder: State of Berlin represented by the State Office for Refugee Affairs (LAF)." Photograph by Adrian Anagnost.
Future site of Tempohomes under construction, Alte Jakobstraße, Berlin, 2017. Photograph by Adrian Anagnost.
[End Page 34] be in use for only three years, to house some five thousand asylum seekers prior to the outcome of their asylum cases.5 Aside from one "container village" on the Tempelhof grounds, these Tempohomes were placed within the urban fabric of Berlin (Fig. 5), rather than concealed within the old airport complex.
Completed Tempohomes, Alte Jakobstraße, Berlin, 2018. Photograph by Manol Gueorguiev.
The Tempohomes could have allowed newcomers to begin making a home in Berlin, to transition from migrant to immigrant. However, the Tempohomes were visibly marked as temporary, as alien to their surroundings.6 Installed behind wire fences, with gates and restricted entry (Fig. 6), the Tempohome sites remain isolated from the surrounding areas. As container-based prefabs, the Tempohomes resemble sites always under construction, never complete. The Tempohomes' aesthetic temporariness placates neighbors with a visible sign that those residences—and thus their inhabitants—are impermanent.
As Tempohome village permits expired in 2018 and 2019, the Berlin Senate proposed to continue operating a handful dedicated to housing refugees through 2025, with others closing by 2021, and the remaining sites given to local communities to use for school or residential construction.7
Where would asylum seekers go? With Berlin facing a housing shortage and rising rents across the city, many asylum seekers have remained in the Tempohomes as long as possible. (In fact, some Tempohomes vacant since 2019 were "reactivated" to house new asylum seekers from Afghanistan and elsewhere [End Page 35] beginning in fall 2021 when the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan. In 2022, some longtime inhabitants of Tempohomes, and even some Afghans who had arrived in Berlin as recently as January 2022, were abruptly relocated to alternate housing, or simply evicted, to make space for Ukrainian refugees.8)
Satellite view of Tempohomes on Alte Jakobstraße, Berlin, 2022. Imagery ©2022 CNES / Airbus, Geobasis-DE/BKG, GeoContent, Maxar Technologies, Map data ©2022 GeoBasis-DE/BKG (©2009).
Completed Tempohomes with surrounding fencing, Alte Jakobstraße, Berlin, 2018. Photograph by Manol Gueorguiev.
Still, the city of Berlin prepared another phase of architectural indeterminacy: Modular Accommodations for Refugees (Modulare Unterkünfte für Flüchtlinge; MUF). Like the Tempohomes, these MUF exist behind physical and social barriers, with guardhouses and restricted entry. The MUF are supposed to last [End Page 36] eighty years, intended for asylum seekers only during the first part of their lifespans before becoming standard social housing. Formally, the MUF are apartment buildings and group housing constructed from prefabricated concrete modules that resemble the Plattenbauten, a mode of prefab construction common in East Germany under socialism that visually evoke the Eastern Bloc for many contemporary Germans.9 The MUF thus call forth the history of European social—and even socialist—housing, instilling these brand-new complexes with the weight of history. But it is a defunct history, and a historical housing typology that no longer quite functions in today's context of financialized public housing.10
The MUF buildings themselves have been criticized for thick walls (which limit interior light and the reach of Wi-Fi), poor sound insulation, and lack of balconies, all of which make the buildings feel temporary and even substandard, not suited for transformation into social housing.11 Moreover, the MUF are isolated from their neighborhoods by walls and gates and often placed in sites at far-flung edges of residential areas, limiting access to commercial areas, jobs, and schools. Nor are there viable plans for moving residents from the MUF to more permanent housing, due to the crisis of affordable housing in Berlin.
Manaf Halbouni, The Flying Dreams at the MUF Wittenberger Straße 16, Berlin, 2019. Photograph by Manol Gueorguiev.
In 2019, Manaf Halbouni, short-term artist-in-residence at the Wittenberger Straße MUF and Syrian-German himself, made this temporality explicit. He attached a large-scale sculpture of an airplane constructed of scrap wood, with a clock affixed to the front, to the small, yellow live-work space of the artist residency (Fig. 7). The plane evoked both flights [End Page 37] of departure from former homes and arrivals in Germany, and it signaled that Halbouni's abode, too, was temporary and mobile. Set within the courtyard of the MUF, isolated from the outer world by locked gates and a guardhouse, the inoperable wooden plane and stopped clock also proclaimed the MUF's imposition of stasis, the near impossibility of departing the permanent temporariness of the condition of migration.
The provisional nature of such housing suggests that belonging, too, is temporary. Newcomers are spatially confined within gated zones or relegated to peripheral areas of the city. They are temporally marked as transient through formally precarious qualities of government housing. Even when refugees and asylum seekers are legally permitted to live in Berlin, their homes' architecture and relationship to site must offer the pretense that it is only a temporary stay. [End Page 38]
ADRIAN ANAGNOST, Associate Professor of art history in the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University, studies space, landscape, urbanism, and embodiment. Past publications have considered the 1940s—60s museology of architect Lina Bo Bardi; Lygia Pape's site-specific 1960s—70s performances and Rio de Janeiro urbanism; the parasitic tendencies of contemporary artist and Chicago-based urbanist Theaster Gates; and artist Dread Scott's Slave Rebellion Reenactment (2019) within Louisiana land- and cityscapes. Anagnost's book Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art and the City in Modern Brazil was published by Yale University Press in 2022. Anagnost is currently collaborating with architectural historian Jesse Lockard on "A priori architectures of settler colonialism and imperial imaginaries," a project focusing on conceptualizations of architectural mobility and site.
Notes
1. Bursts of immediacy arise, say, in the time before deadlines to file key paperwork for legal regularization. See Carolina Kobelinsky, "Le temps dilaté, l'espace rétréci: Le quotidien des demandeurs d'asile," in "Attendre," ed. Christian Bromberger, special issue, Terrain 63 (September 2014): 22–37, http://journals.openedition.org/terrain/15479. See also Kirsi Pauliina Kallio, Isabel Meier, and Jouni Hakli, "Radical Hope in Asylum Seeking: Political Agency beyond Linear Temporality," Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47, no. 17 (2021): 4006–07, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1764344; Kari Anne Drangsland, "Bordering through Recalibration: Exploring the Temporality of the German 'Ausbildungsduldung,'" Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 38, no. 6 (September 2020): 1128–45, https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654420915611.
2. Social housing in the E.U. emerges along with the modern nation-state, in which social rights "came eventually to be awarded not on the basis of class or need by rather on the basis of citizenship." Christoph Reinprecht, "Social Housing in Austria," in Social Housing in Europe, ed. Kathleen Scanlon, Christine Whitehead, and Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 71. See also Kenny Cupers, "Human Territoriality and the Downfall of Public Housing," Public Culture 29, no. 1 (January 2017): 165–90, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363–3644445; Peter Malpass, "Histories of Social Housing: A Comparative Approach," in Social Housing in Europe II, ed. Kathleen Scanlon and Christine Whitehead (London: London School of Economics, 2008), 15–30.
3. Madeline Otis Campbell and Anita Fábos, "Subcontracting Refuge: Humanitarian Infrastructure, Privatization, and the Choice to Protect," in Maintaining Refuge: Anthropological Reflections in Uncertain Times, ed. David Haines, Jayne Howell, and Fethi Keles (Washington, D.C.: Committee on Refugees and Immigrants, 2017), 67.
4. On the terms "newcomer" and Heimat ("home"/"homeland"), see Peter Cachola Schmal, Peter, Anna Scheuermann, and Oliver Elser, Making Heimat: Germany, Arrival Country: Atlas of Refugee Housing = Flüchtlingsbautenatlas (Frankfurt: Deutsches Architekturmuseum/Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2017).
5. "Tempohomes FAQ," Landesamt für Flüchtlingsangelegenheiten, July 15, 2016, https://www.berlin.de/laf/wohnen/allgemeine-informationen/tempohomes-faq; Ben Knight "Berlin Builds New Refugee Homes," Deutsche Welle, June 2, 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-builds-dozens-of-new-refugee-homes-despite-falling-numbers/a-53659481.
6. Tempohome sites were placed disproportionately in areas of the city already beset by high rates of unemployment and poverty and by limited primary school capacity. Christian Sowa, "Migrant Accommodation as a Housing Question, and How (Not) to Solve It," Radical Housing Journal 2, no. 2 (December 2020): 107-08. On inhabitants' adaptations of the Tempohome interiors, see Ayham Dalal, Aline Fraikin, and Antonia Noll, "Appropriating Berlin's Tempohomes," in Spatial Transformations: Kaleidoscopic Perspectives on the Refiguration of Spaces, ed. Angela Million et al. (New York: Routledge, 2021), 285-93.
7. Manfred Götzke, "Berlin baut Wohncontainer für Geflüchtete ab: Die Dörfer sollen weg," Deustchlandfunk Kultur, December 4, 2019, https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/berlin-baut-wohncontainer-fuer-gefluechtete-ab-die-doerfer-100.html; "Senat will Flüchtlingsunterkünfte länger betreiben als geplant," RBB, January 13, 2020, https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2020/01/tempohomes-berlin-weiternutzung-fluechtlinge.html.
8. Christian Latz, "Senat rechnet mit steigenden Flüchtlingszahlen: Berlin schafft zusätzliche Unterkünfte für Geflüchtete," Der Tagesspiel, October 19, 2021, https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/senat-rechnet-mit-steigenden-fluechtlingszahlen-berlin-schafft-zusaetzliche-unterkuenfte-fuer-gefluechtete/27718538.html; Christian Gehrke, "Flüchtlinge mussen in Berlin-Reinickendorf fur neue weichen," Berliner Zeitung, March 5, 2022, https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/news/fluechtlinge-muessen-in-berlin-reinickendorf-fuer-neue-weichen-li.215476; Stefanie Glinski, "Germany Is Displacing Afghan Refugees to Make Way for Ukrainians," Foreign Policy, April 20, 2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/20/germany-refugee-policy-afghanistan-ukraine.
9. Zora Sauerteig, "Refugee Homes: The New Plattenbau?" EXBERLINER, June 23, 2017, https://www.exberliner.com/features/zeitgeist/refugee-homes-the-new-plattenbau.
10. Opposition to the MUF often hinges on their high costs, particularly in comparison to Berlin's regular social housing programs or market-rate construction, as well as the need for affordable permanent housing for multiple constituencies in Berlin. Laura Berner, "Gute Wohnungen für alle statt neuer Substandard und Wohnheime," MieterEcho, no. 396 (June 2018), https://www.bmgev.de/mieterecho/archiv/2018/me-single/article/teure-zwischenloesung-muf; Ulrich Paul, "Neue Flücht lingsunterkünfte in Marzahn: Jede Wohnung mit Bad und Kuche," Berliner Kurier, November 11, 2020, https://www.berliner-kurier.de/wohnen/neue-fluechtlingsunterkuenfte-in-marzahn-jede-wohnung-mit-bad-und-kueche-li.118157.
11. Sauerteig, "Refugee Homes"; Berner, "Gute Wohnungen."
EMILY J. HOGG is Associate Professor of contemporary Anglophone literature at the University of Southern Denmark. She is coeditor of Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Bloomsbury, 2021) and her work has appeared in Textual Practice, Criticism, and English Studies, among other venues. She is the PI of the research project "Feminized: A New Literary History of Women's Work," funded by the Carlsberg Foundation.
BRYAN YAZELL is Assistant Professor of American literature at the University of Southern Denmark and a fellow at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study. His forthcoming book, The American Vagrant in Literature: Race, Work and Welfare (Edinburgh UP), examines vagabond figures in literature alongside the development of welfare state infrastructures in the U.S. and Britain
Notes
1. ACAVA, "Grenfell Memorial Community Mosaic," https://www.acava.org/programmes/grenfell-memorial-community-mosaic.
2. Grenfell Tower Inquiry, "Phase 1 Report Overview," October 2019, 1–2, https://assets.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/GTI%20-%20Phase%201%20report%20Executive%20Summary.pdf.
3. Ibid., 5, 24.
4. Grenfell Tower Memorial Commission, "Remembering Grenfell: Our Story So Far," May 2022, 37, https://www.grenfelltowermemorial.co.uk/report. The Commission comprises two co-chairs, as well as five representatives of bereaved families, three representatives of former residents, and two representatives of the wider estate, Lancaster West, on which the Tower is located.
5. Ibid., 37.
6. Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism (Ropley, UK: Zero Books, 2008), 9.
7. Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History (London: Granta Books, 2012), 11.
8. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 4–5.
9. Kathleen Scanlon, Christine Whitehead, and Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, introduction to Social Housing in Europe, ed. Kathleen Scanlon, Christine Whitehead, and Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 1–20.
10. Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), vii.
11. Denmark's "ghetto list" policy, which unequally targets migrant communities with mass evictions from social housing, is particularly egregious. For more, see Feargus O'Sullivan, "How Denmark's 'Ghetto List' Is Ripping Apart Migrant Communities," The Guardian, March 11, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/how-denmarks-ghetto-list-is-ripping-apart-migrant-communities.
12. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 196.