UC Berkeley

Temporary Measures: Housing Insecurity, Waiting, and Injury in Post-Grenfell London examines London’s growing housing crisis, focusing specifically on the use of temporary accommodation (TA) and the provision of interim shelter for vulnerable populations by local government. TA was situated in the cracks produced by the undelivered promise of the English social housing program and the experience of chronic housing insecurity in contemporary London. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Borough of Newham, in East London, this dissertation examines the ways families in temporary accommodation experienced uncertainty in cycles of housing deprivation, and how they challenged their conditions in collaboration with a direct action housing campaign called Focus E15. Only temporary in name, as I argue throughout this dissertation, the punctuated temporalities of the temporary and of waiting constituted the cyclicality of housing insecurity that generated diffuse practices of neglect for London’s vulnerable housing-insecure population. Moving across scales, I analyze the embodied, existential, material, and temporal experiences through which housing insecurity manifested by focusing my analysis on such everyday phenomena as a set of stairs, mold, and geographic displacement. Through an analysis across these scales, I attended to the registers in which women came to articulate their individual experiences in the form of political and legal challenges against the management of housing and the temporal/spatial conditions of their waiting. When these women demanded safe and permanent housing, they were told that “your time is coming”—but this “time” was endlessly deferred. In the wake of the lessons learned from the Grenfell Tower fire, this dissertation reflects on what it means to live in endemic insecurity with the heightened sense of living in, and with, different and intersecting forms of exposures.