A Matter of “Co‐opportunism”: (In)Alienability in London Social Housing

Abstract

This paper explores the dynamics of temporary urban residency. It looks at the relationships between domesticity, mobility and improvisational housing – all relevant to Britain's housing crisis. Hence, I offer a reflexive ethnographic description of ‘short‐life’ co‐op living based on a five year account of managing vacant properties that await refurbishment or re‐development by two major Charitable Housing Trusts based in West London. In questioning how tenants deal with the constant threat of having to move, I ask how members of a short‐life housing co‐op create their own sense of self and stability through a temporary form of accommodation. My goal is thus to investigate how these co‐op tenants appropriate space, relocate themselves and cope with transient domestic alienability. The creative formulation of individual and community identities are central to the wider understanding and implications of residential instability, alternative lifestyles and the general underlying ethos of co‐operative organizations.

Balancing the formal and the informal: the relational challenges of everyday practices of co-operation in shared housing co-operatives in the UK

“…These claims are substantiated by the insights into everyday practices of co-operation provided by a small number of recent ethnographic studies of housing co-operatives (albeit not all in the form of mutual ownership or shared occupancy under one roof). Laviolette's (2008) account of life in a London-based short-life housing co-op, where members reside temporarily in (mostly) shared properties destined for demolition or redevelopment, highlights the complex relationship that develops between 'domesticity, mobility and improvisational housing' (p. 130) and the impact this has on the relationships that consequently develop between members of the housing co-operative. Procupez (2008) likewise provides an insightful account of a collective housing project in Buenos Aires that provides shared accommodation for low-income families.…”

‘My Waka Journey’

“…My time at the Bartlett equally allowed me to distil some findings from a long-term study of cooperative social housing, which I had been undertaking since 2000. From this I have presented a number of papers and published an article that appears in the twentieth-anniversary issue of the AAA's journal City & Society (Laviolette 2008a). Such projects are largely subsumed under the rubric dealing with the material, visual and sensory dimensions of domesticity.…”

Context Of The Term “Opportunism” In Economic Science

“…"The problems of inefficiency of any company are not limited to opportunism, but also include the problems of communication, cognition and interpretation, and all these problems are closely related to each other. We can also find further development of this term: co-opportunism as a kind of behavior in transient urban domesticity (Laviolette, 2008). Pletnev (2015) and Pletnev and Kozlova (2018) consider opportunism in a broader context, as self-seeking behavior, contrary to cooperation and coercion as an alternative driver of human behavior.…”