Everyday activism: Private tenants demand right to home
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought under the spotlight home’s severe inadequacies, which take a particular intensity in the various unregulated, insecure rental housing markets across the globe. It is now timely to deliberate what it takes for a rented property to be made home, and in that debate tenants’ voices should be heard. Taking the UK as a case-study and drawing on data collected through an online qualitative questionnaire, the paper focuses on a group of tenants theorised as ‘everyday activists’ to address the empirical question of what they demand from the government for the sector to improve. Considering participants’ legitimising narratives and assertions for self-representation in policy construction, the paper then proposes a reading of the demands made through the ‘Right to Home’, a concept carefully grounded in Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the City. The Right to Home calls for home-ing and democratising current de-radicalised understandings of the right to housing in order to craft more transformative futures.
Author: Dr Adriana Mihaela Soaita
Read the full article on the Housing Studies Journal website.
More information
- This paper is part of the CaCHE project, The rented sector, evictions and activism, together with other outputs:
- Article: Researching tenant activism by using an uncommon method: the online written interview
- CaCHE report: Renting during the covid-19 pandemic in great Britain: the experiences of private tenants
- Blog: The experiences of private tenants during the covid-19 pandemic in Great Britain
- Blog: A valuable methodological tool: the ‘online written interview’
Date: February 10, 2022 9:00 am
Author(s): Adriana Mihaela Soaita
Categorised in: Cross-cutting
« Back to publications
