Urban Displacements

Book excerpt: With an eye to further our understanding of everyday life in global capitalism, Urban Displacements provides the first systemic critical political economy analysis of low-income rental housing and social dislocations, combining both theoretical advancements and detailed empirical studies, centering on Berlin, Dublin and Vienna. Soederberg pushes beyond dominant debates by treating low-rent housing as a unique commodity that provides a necessary place for the societal reproduction of labour power whilst being integrated into the global dynamics of capitalism. She argues that historical and geographical configurations of monetized governance, including landlords, employers and inter-scalar state practices, have served to reproduce urban displacements and obfuscate their gendered, class and racialized underpinnings. The outcome is the everyday facilitation and normalization of urban poverty and social marginalization on one side, and capital accumulation on the other. Building on Soederberg’s previous book Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry, this accessible and interdisciplinary text will be useful to academics and students in political science, sociology, geography, urban studies, labour studies, European studies and gender studies.