Responsibility for housing: Property, displacement, and the rental market

As property speculation has become an integral element of the rental market, debates on housing dispossession and displacement regularly place normative claims responsibilities for provisioning, maintanance, safeguarding adequate affordable housing. Yet, while offering important perspectives, these discussions lack a theoretically grounded account responsibility that would allow analysis critique how modes irresponsibility are practised understanding practises mediated by liberal regimes (Singer, 2000, Blomley, 2013). Focusing evacuation mass complex Hannibal II in municipality Dortmund (Germany) eviction its 753 tenants context decades-long processes speculative disinvestment neglect, this paper explores lived relations (ir)responsibility shape How is assigned, abdicated, enacted all concerned parties? Based discussion building’s decay, tenants’ later redevelopment attempts, we argue narrow understandings inscribed obscure work alongside, disguise, or stabilize vulnerabilities harms regimes. In conclusion thus suggest reading relationally – as string social agreements mediate relation between people (Cooper, 2007, 2020) requires rethinking propose broader conception feminist, political, encompassing.