Abstract
Today, forced evictions in the name of ‘progress’ are attracting attention as growing numbers of people in the Global South are ejected and dispossessed from their homes, often through intimidation, coercion and the use of violence. At the same time, we have also witnessed the intensification of a ‘crisis’ urbanism in the Global North characterized by new forms of social inequality, heightened housing insecurity and violent displacement. This introductory chapter examines how these developments have led to an explosion of forced evictions supported by new economic, political and legal mechanisms, and increasingly shaped by intensifying environmental change. It does so with reference to the 8 chapters on forced eviction that follow from across urban Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Álvarez de Andrésa, A., Zapata Campos, M. J., & Zapata, P. (2015). Stop the evictions! The diffusion of networked social movements and the emergence of a hybrid space: The case of the Spanish Mortgage Victims Group. Habitat International, 46, 252–259.
Amin, A. (2014). Lively infrastructure. Theory, Culture & Society, 31(7/8), 137–161.
Amnesty International. (2012). Imprisoned for speaking out – Update on Phnom Penh’s Boeung Kak Lake. ASA 23/010/2012. http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/ASA23/010/2012/en
Anderson, K., & Smith, S. J. (2001). Editorial: Emotional geographies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26(1), 7–10.
Barbero, I. (2015). When rights need to be (re) claimed: Austerity measures neoliberal housing policies and anti-eviction activism in Spain. Critical Social Policy, 35(2), 270–280.
Baxter, R., & Brickell, K. (2014). For home unmaking. Home Cultures, 11(2), 133–143.
Blomley, N. K. (2008). Enclosure, common right and the property of the poor. Social and Legal Studies, 17(3), 311–331.
Blunt, A., & Dowling, R. M. (2006). Home. London: Routledge.
Brenner, N., & Theodore, N. (2002). Cities and the geographies of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’. Antipode, 34(3), 349–379.
Brickell, K. (2012). Geopolitics of home. Geography Compass, 6(10), 575–588.
Brickell, K. (2014). “The Whole World is Watching”: Intimate geopolitics of forced eviction and women’s activism in Cambodia. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(6), 1256–1272.
Butler, J. (2006). Precarious life: The power of mourning and violence. London: Verso.
Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Casolo, J., & Doshi, S. (2013). Domesticated dispossessions? Towards a transnational feminist geopolitics of development. Geopolitics, 18(4), 800–834.
Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE). (2010). Briefing paper: The impact of forced evictions on women. Retrieved January 24, 2014, from http://www.cohre.org/news/documents/briefing-paperthe-impact-of-forced-evictions-on-women
Datta, A. (2012). The illegal city: Space, law and gender in a delhi squatter settlement. Farnham: Ashgate.
Declós, C. (2013). ‘Victims no longer: Spain’s anti-eviction movement’ in Open Security. 17 December. https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/carlos-delcl%C3%B3s/victims-no-longer-spain%E2%80%99s-anti-eviction-movement
Desmond, M. (2012). Eviction and the reproduction of urban poverty. American Journal of Sociology, 118(1), 88–133.
Desmond, M. (2016). Eviction: Poverty and profit in the American city. London: Allen Lane.
Dittmer, J. (2014). Geopolitical assemblages and complexity’. Progress in Human Geography, 38(3), 385–401.
Dwyer, M. B. (2014). Micro-geopolitics: Capitalizing security in Laos’s golden quadrangle. Geopolitics, 19(2), 377–405.
Elden, S. (2013). The Birth of Territory. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press.
Engels, F. (1995 [1872]). The housing question. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/index.htm
Farías, I. (2009). Introduction. In I. Farías & T. Bender (Eds.), Urban assemblages: How actor-network theory changes Urban Studies (pp. 1–24). London: Routledge.
Feldman, S., Geisler, C., & Menon, G. (Eds.). (2011). Accumulating insecurity: Violence and dispossession in the making of everyday life. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Fernández Arrigoitia, M. (2014). Unmaking public housing towers: The role of lifts and stairs in the demolition of a Puerto Rican project. Home Cultures, 11(2), 167–196.
Gandy, M. (2005). Cyborg urbanization: Complexity and monstrosity in the contemporary city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29, 26–49.
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge: Polity.
Gorman-Murray, A., McKinnon, S., & Dominey-Howes, D. (2014). Queer Domicide? LGBT displacement and home loss in natural disaster impact, response and recovery. Home Cultures, 11(2), 237–262.
Harker, C. (2009). Spacing Palestine through the home. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34(3), 320–332.
Harvey, D. (1981). The spatial fix. Antipode 13(3), 1–12.
Harvey, D. (2007). Neoliberalism as creative destruction. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 601(1), 21–44.
Harvey, D. (2008). The right to the city. New Left Review, 53, 23–40.
Harvey, D. (2012). Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the Urban revolution. London: Verso.
Hyndman, J. (2004). Mind the gap: Bridging feminist and political geography through geopolitics. Political Geography, 23(3), 307–322.
Jacobs, J. (2012). Urban geographies I: Still thinking cities relationally. Progress in Human Geography, 36(3), 412–422.
Jacobs, J., & Cairns, S. (2011). Ecologies of dwelling: Maintaining high-rise housing in Singapore. In S. Watson & G. Bridge (Eds.), The new companion to the city (pp. 79–95). Oxford: Blackwell.
Jacobs, J., & Merriman, P. (2011). Practising architectures. Social and Cultural Geography, 12(3), 211–222.
Janoschka, M., & Sequera, J. (2014). Procesos de gentrificación ydesplazamiento en América Latina, una perspectiva comparativista. In J. J. Michelini (Ed.), Desafíos metropolitanos. Un diálogo entre Europa y América Latina (pp. 82–104). Madrid: Catarata.
Jeffrey, A., McFarlane, C., & Vasudevan, A. (2012). Re-thinking enclosure: Space, subjectivity, and the commons. Antipode, 44(4), 1247–1267.
Kaag, M., & Zoomers, A. (Eds.). (2014). The global land grab: Beyond the hype. London: Zed Books.
Lancione, M. (2014). Assemblages of care and the analysis of public policies on homelessness in Turin, Italy. City, 18(1), 25–40.
Lees, L. (2014). The urban injustices of New Labours’s ‘New Urban Renewal’: The case of the Aylesbury Estate in London’. Antipode, 46(4), 921–947.
Lemanski, C. (2012). Everyday human (in)security: Rescaling for the Southern city. Security Dialogue, 43(1), 61–78.
Liberti, S. (2014). Land grabbing: Journeys in the new colonialism. London: Verso.
Linebaugh, P. (2014). Stop thief: The commons, enclosures and resistance. San Francisco, CA: PM Press.
Martínez López, M. A., & García Bernardos, A. (2015). The occupation of squares and the squatting of buildings: Lessons from the convergence of two social movements. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(1), 157–184.
Massaro, V., & Williams, J. (2013). Feminist geopolitics: Redefining the geopolitical, complicating (in)security. Geography Compass, 7/8, 567–577.
McFarlane, C. (2011). The city as assemblage: Dwelling and urban space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(4), 649–671.
McFarlane, C., & Vasudevan, A. (2013). Informal infrastructures. In P. Adey, D. Bissell, K. Hannam, P. Merriman, & M. Sheller (Eds.), Handbook of mobilities (pp. 256–264). London: Routledge.
Nally, D. (2015). Governing precarious lives: land grabs, geopolitics, and ‘food security’. The Geographical Journal, 181(4), 340–349.
Novak, P. (2014). Zwangsräumungen verhindern: ob nuriye ob kalle, wir bleiben alle. Münster: Edition Assemblage.
Nowicki, M. (2014). Rethinking domicide: Towards an expanded critical geography of home. Geography Compass, 8(11), 785–795.
Olds, K. T., Bunnell, T., & Leckie, S. (2002). Forced evictions in tropical cities: An introduction. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 23(3), 247–251.
Otiso, K. F. (2002). Forced evictions in Kenyan cities. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 23(3), 252–267.
Pain, R., & Staeheli, L. (2014). Introduction: Intimacy-geopolitics and violence. Area, 46, 344–347.
Philo, C. (2005). The geographies that wound. Population, Space and Place, 11(6), 441–454.
Porteous, D., & Smith, S. (2001). Domicide: The global destruction of home. Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press.
Power, M. (2010). Geopolitics and ‘development’: an introduction. Geopolitics, 15(3), 433–440.
Power, M., & Mohan, G. (2010). Towards a critical geopolitics of China’s engagement with African development. Geopolitics, 15(3), 462–495.
Pratt, G., & Rosner, V. (2006). Introduction: The global and the intimate. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 34(1–2), 13–24.
Purser, G. (2016). The circle of dispossession: Evicting the urban poor in Baltimore. Critical Sociology, 42(3), 393–415.
Ramakrishnan, K. (2013). Disrupted futures: Unpacking metaphors of marginalization in eviction and resettlement narratives. Antipode, 46(3), 754–772.
Ramakrishnan, K. (2014). Cosmopolitan imaginaries on the margins: Negotiating difference and belonging in a Delhi resettlement colony. Contemporary South Asia, 22(1), 67–81.
Retort. (2006). Afflicted powers: Capital and spectacle in a new age of war. London: Verso.
Richardson, J., Nash, J., Tan, K., & Macdonald, M. (2014). Mental health impacts of forced land evictions on women in Cambodia. Journal of International Development. Online before print.
Romanos, E. (2014). Evictions, petitions and escraches: Contentious housing in austerity Spain. Social Movement Studies, 13(2), 296–302.
Roy, A. (2015). What is urban about urban critical theory? Urban Geography, 37(6), 810–823.
Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sevilla-Buitrago, A. (2014). Central Park against the streets: The enclosure of public space cultures in mid-nineteenth century New York. Social and Cultural Geography, 15(2), 151–171.
Simone, A. M. (2014). Jakarta: Drawing the city near. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Smith, S. (2012). Intimate geopolitics: Religion, marriage, and reproductive bodies in Leh, Ladakh. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(6), 1511–1528.
Springer, S. (2013). Violent accumulation: A postanarchist critique of property, dispossession, and the state of exception in neoliberalizing Cambodia. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103(3), 608–626.
UN-HABITAT (2011). Forced evictions: Global crisis, global solution. Nairobi: UN-HABITAT.
UN-HABITAT & UNHRP (2014). Assessing the Impact of Eviction: Handbook. Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme and United Nations Housing Rights Programme.
Vasudevan, A. (2013). Reclaiming life in the precarious city. https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/alex-vasudevan/reclaiming-life-in-precarious-city
Vasudevan, A. (2015). Metropolitan preoccupations: The spatial politics of squatting in Berlin. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Vasudevan, A., Jeffrey, A., & McFarlane, C. (2008). Spaces of enclosure. Geoforum, 39(5), 1641–1646.
Veracini, L. (2015). The settler colonial present. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wacquant, L. (2008). Urban outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Wolford, W., Borras Jr., S. M., Hall, R., Scoones, I., & White, B. (2013). Governing global land deals: The role of the state in the rush for land. Development and Change, 44(2), 189–210.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brickell, K., Arrigoitia, M.F., Vasudevan, A. (2017). Geographies of Forced Eviction: Dispossession, Violence, Resistance. In: Brickell, K., Fernández Arrigoitia, M., Vasudevan, A. (eds) Geographies of Forced Eviction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51127-0_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51127-0_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-51126-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-51127-0
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)