Housing as an Exception, Eviction as Everyday Life

Abstract

: This article focuses on evictability and the eviction of the residents of one block of flats in a small southern Slovakian town. Most of the building’s inhabitants are Roma, but the problem of cultural racism is interconnected with political, economic, legal, and even research and activist issues. The article is based on socially committed ethnographic research and the perspective of critical human geography. The theoretical framework is informed by the geographies of eviction, which grasp evictions as a becoming affective process. In this approach the focus is on not just the structural and other causes of eviction and its negative consequences but also and above all on the eviction that is taking place in the present and that temporally goes beyond the act of displacement – it signifies the lasting effect of sovereign power exercised through threats of eviction and ‘home unmaking’ brought about by the withholding of vital infrastructure. The analysis distinguishes four becoming phases. The first one shows how tenants’ precarity is made when their stigmatisation as Roma intersects with the neoliberal imperatives of individual responsibility asserted by the town. In the second phase, the eviction begins, giving rise to affects of confusion, desperation, and fear. The third phase brings resistance to the arbitrary sovereign power of the town authorities. In the fourth phase the resistance sees some successes, but the town’s sovereign power at the same time expands its spatiality. The state of the eviction here is not final and it can still develop in different ways.