Dialogues in Human Geography | 2021
Against neoliberal domicide
Abstract
During the early hours of 14 June 2017, a devastating fire engulfed Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey block of flats built for public rented housing in London. It was the deadliest residential fire in peacetime Britain for 800 years, killing 72 people and rendering 201 households instantly homeless. The dead and displaced were in one sense victims of a ruthless public-private partnership between a cost-cutting local authority and profiteering commercial contractors who oversaw a botched and unlawful refurbishment scheme – trampling over residents’ safety concerns along the way – that fatally undermined the building’s original ability to resist the spread of fire and toxic smoke and protect its inhabitants. Of critical significance was the infamous aluminium ‘cladding’ and foam insulation behind it – fitted to reduce heat loss and ‘beautify’ the brutalist grey concrete tower regarded by the local property machine as blighting the area’s land values – that would provide a fuel load equivalent of 32,000 litres of petrol. The fire’s rapid spread was facilitated by so many defective structures and systems that the firefighters had no chance of being able to control the blaze. And yet, many more residents could still have survived if they had not been told to ‘stay put’ in their flats while the fire raged in the mistaken belief that the building’s design would protect those inside. As the ongoing public inquiry has revealed, the disaster’s causality extends way beyond the immediate public and private bodies implicated in the fire, to the very heart of the neoliberal state. Safe as Houses is not directly about the Grenfell Disaster, but Grenfell was its motivation and connecting point throughout. The book focuses on the home and life-destroying consequences of four decades of neoliberal policies in the UK – and specifically England – whose fingerprints were all over the Grenfell crime scene. By rolling back state provision and social protections through privatisation, outsourcing and deregulation, successive governments have conspired to recommodify the provision and consumption of housing, transforming shelter into an increasingly financialised asset produced in a largely selfregulating environment irrespective of tenure. Assembling evidence from other public housing regeneration schemes in England, the book set out to prove beyond doubt that Grenfell was neither an accident nor a one-off event but instead an extreme outcome of a much wider production of neoliberal domicide. I would like to thank Mara Ferreri, Joe Penny, and Ryan Powell for their generous reviews that perceptively identify some important cross-cutting themes as well as problematizing aspects of the book’s argument that have greatly stimulated my own thinking across four themes: activist scholarship and accountability from below; new enclosures; power asymmetries, violence and chronic urban trauma; and reimagining alternatives beyond the state.