ABSTRACT
This conference paper is a much shorter versión of a recently published article in City (Watt, 2016). It builds upon Colin McFarlane’s (2011a) controversial call for an ‘assemblage urbanism’ to supplement critical urbanism (Brenner et al., 2011). It aims to supplement rather than supplant critical urbanism. This supplementing occurs via a mapping of the spatio-political contours of London’s 21st century housing crisis through the geophilosophical framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (2013) and Hardt and Negri’s analysis of the metropolis in Commonwealth (2009). The paper examines the Focus E15 housing campaign based around a group of young mothers in the East London borough of Newham. In 2013 the mothers were living in the Focus E15 Foyer supported housing unit for young people in Newham, but they were subsequently threatened with eviction as a result of welfare cuts. After successfully contesting the mothers’ own prospective expulsion from the city, the campaign shifted to the broader struggle for ‘social housing not social cleansing’. The paper draws upon participant observation at campaign events and interviews with key members. The Focus E15 campaign has engaged in a series of actions which form a distinctive way of undertaking housing politics in London, a politics that can be understood using a Deleuzoguattarian framework. Several campaign actions, including temporary occupations, are analysed. It is argued that these actions have created ‘smooth space’ in a manner which is to an extent distinctive from many other London housing campaigns which are rooted in a more sedentary defensive approach to place and the protection of existing homes and communities – ‘our place’. It is such spatio-political creativity – operating as a ‘nomadic war machine’ – which has given rise to the highprofile reputation of the Focus E15 campaigners as inspirational young women who do not ‘know their place’.
