Dwelling-in-eviction: Improvised practices of inhabiting Dublin’s private rental sector

In Ireland’s housing crisis, evictions are the violent manifestation of large processes of welfare ruination such as austerity, neoliberalism and the accompanying financialization of housing. In Dublin, Ireland, private rental sector (PRS) tenants are perpetually engaging with eviction. In this article, by combining theoretical interventions in the study of the ruination of western European welfare states, improvisation and rehearsal from scholarship in urban studies and radical theory on inhabitation and eviction – I firstly, explore the practical dimensions of the experience of evictions in Dublin’s PRS. Evictions are woven into the workings of the PRS and tenants are made familiar with dispossession even before the concrete threat of eviction arises. This familiarity produces the basis for improvisation of security in conditions of extreme housing precarity.

Secondly, and more centrally through scholar-activist ethnographic involvement with Community Action Tenant’s Union (CATU), Ireland, I identify and study three improvised practices (of homelessness, delay and overhold) of tenants who effectively extend the process of their eviction to retain shelter for longer. Tenants try and stretch the process of eviction to their benefit by drawing into repertoires of those without shelter, by using (quasi)legal tactics and combining them with direct action and finally by overholding i.e. not leaving the site of eviction thereby altering the landlord-tenant relationship and questioning the bases of entitlement to private property through practice. These practices comprise what I call the concept of dwelling-in-eviction, the main contribution of this paper.