Dave Cowan

Policing Unauthorized Camping

We argue that the links between welfare, policing, and exclusion, though rarely made explicit, nevertheless form the undercurrent of the modern neo-liberal state. In making this argument, we draw particularly upon the voluminous literature which amplifies the seminal work of Foucault, especially as it relates to government. Thereafter, we apply this set of understandings to the way in which the unauthorized encampments of Gypsies and Travellers are policed. We concentrate first on the construction of legislation and its legal aftermath. Subsequently, we draw upon case study evidence to illustrate our thesis, particularly focusing on the sorting processes of decision-makers.

Policing the housing crisis

In this paper, we argue that the ‘crime control housing crisis’ which has engulfed social housing is qualitatively different from most previous and current understandings of housing crisis (which have been of a quantita tive nature, or been resolved to that). By contrast, the crime control housing crisis is a crisis precisely because it appears insoluble. All hous ing problems and policies now have to be legitimated by reference to this crime control housing crisis. The gaze of this crisis has been upon the ‘social’ sector, but that has also caused reflection on how to placate the crime control housing crisis in the private sector. It is this latter area that is the focus of the case study in the second part of this paper and starkly raises the central, deceptively simple, problematization for government: how to govern the ungovernable without being seen to govern. The case study concerns regulations promulgated by the Northern Ireland Housing Executive regarding the licensing of houses in multiple occupation. We argue that this regulation is symptomatic of a mutated ‘housing crisis’ in which the old questions of the adequacy of provision have been supplanted by new questions of responsibility for deviant behaviour.

Adjudicating the implementation of homelessness law: The promise of socio-legal studies

This paper offers a re-consideration of the contexts within which discretionary homelessness decision making takes place. Drawing on socio-legal studies, it is argued that one such context (which has regularly been ignored within the housing studies literature) is compliance with the law. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data of internal reviews of homelessness decision making, the paper considers how far (and under what conditions) initial decision making might be affected by its adjudication.

Structuring governance: A case study of the new organizational provision of public service delivery

Drawing on research findings concerning the new management structures and paradigms in the range of services formerly provided within the public sector, this paper reports on research conducted into the governing structures of a newly registered social landlord, formed to take over a local authority’s housing stock. Using a variety of ethnographic methods, the research looked at the ways in which the members of the governing body translated understandings of neutrality into their everyday practices and how expertise was constructed by the members themselves as well as their perceptions of each other’s expertise. We conclude by relating the findings of our research to other literature on citizen participation and argue that these elements of neutrality and expertise lie in tension with, and constrain, effective participation.

Ownership, Narrative, Things

This is a book about the everyday life of “shared ownership”, a peculiar pragmatic invention, both in label and in design. Although it is much messier than this, the marketing slogan for shared ownership is that it involves “part buy, part rent”. However, although shared ownership forms its substantive subject matter, the book ranges across, and makes a contribution to, various methodological pre-occupations of ours—legal consciousness, actor–network theory, property—and diverse interdisciplinary approaches to ownership, home, and things. In this chapter, we set out how we bring these diverse pre-occupations together and introduce this thing called “shared ownership”.

Shared Ownership and Housing Policy

This chapter presents a study of housing policy from the periphery. As we develop below, it is not its numerical significance as a tenure that makes shared ownership so important; rather, it is its totemic significance in housing policy and its location as a social housing low-cost homeownership “product” which make it an object of study. Our argument is that, in the very way in which it is discussed and represented in policy and by policy-makers, shared ownership appears as a very simple “product”, albeit one which has gone through a series of different iterations. And, most of all, shared ownership is constructed as ownership. That very simple ownership product, at heart, is how shared ownership came to be represented and translated by a range of others, including buyers—to adopt the metaphor widely used in policy documents, enabling people to “get a foot on the ladder” of “homeownership”. And, of course, these are very legal translations.

Experiencing Shared Ownership

In this chapter, we focus on our buyer participants’ data, and analyse their experiences of shared ownership. Our focus is on how they understand ownership and where they “fit” within it. As we demonstrated in Chap. 1, ownership is a complex and undulating concept in theory. One of the questions in our study was where it stopped and other’s responsibilities started. Shared ownership is a complex product. As we noted in Chaps. 2 and 3, although buyers purchase a share in the property, they do so with strings attached. They are entirely responsible for their internal repairs and improvements; although the association or managing agent is responsible for conducting external repairs and improvements, shared owners are responsible for the entire share attributable to their property (whatever proportion they own); there are restrictions on what shared owners are entitled to do with their property—they are not entitled to sub-let it and, at the time of our research, there were restrictions on re-sale (the association had a limited period within which it could nominate a buyer at an independent valuation).

Assembling Shared Ownership

In this chapter, we draw together our analysis of the key themes of this book around five randomly selected narratives provided by the shared owner buyers we interviewed. In these narratives, complex stories are told about ownership, as “merchants of morality” (Goffman 1956: 253), and about what Paul Watt has described as “selective belonging”, a “spatially uneven sense of belonging and attachment” (2009: 2888; see also Jackson and Benson 2014). They are stories of differentiation, picking up on one of the themes of Chap. 5. They are narratives through which identities are performed and co-constituted with objects around the interviewees’ homes, over time. As Benson and Jackson (2017: 6) put it: “The repeated and reiterative narration of negotiations in relation to housing – triumphs, anxieties and ambivalences – reveal differences in what people have, how they make sense of this and how they cope.”

Messiness and Techniques of Simplification

In this chapter, the authors conclude their study with a discussion around the techniques we use to simplify what are messy devices. They draw attention to the ways in which these techniques obscure the idea of property. They also outline the limits of their study and the further work needed to think about property and housing from the periphery.

Selling and Buying Shared Ownership

In the previous two chapters, we have discussed how and why shared ownership became knowable. In this chapter, we move on to consider how shared ownership is sold and why it is bought. One of the issues confronting housing associations wishing to sell shared ownership is the general lack of knowledge about it, even after 40 years or so. That lack of knowledge may be less since the advent of the internet’s search ability and since some Web-based property sale platforms have introduced a shared ownership filter. However, there is still a need to “sell” shared ownership, both in terms of the concept and in terms of marketing properties.