The Relational Articulation of Housing Crisis and Activism in Post-Crash Dublin , Ireland

In this chapter, we look at the evolving relationships between the commodification of housing and the role of activism in the Irish context. We draw on the periodizations of Manuel Aalbers (2015), with respect to the changing role of housing, and Margit Mayer (2013), with respect to social movements as shaped by neoliberalism, to unpack the ways in which the particular character of housing systems both creates specific crises and necessitates specific contingent and conjunctural responses from activist movements. In line with her long-standing interest in urban social movements and politics, urban scholar Mayer (2013, 5) has suggested the need to consider how contemporary activism responds to, and is shaped by, the impact of the different waves of the neoliberalization of cities because ‘urban protests and the claims made on urban development address—and correspond with—specifically neoliberal designs and enclosures’. In her periodization, she highlights four phases: Fordist/Keynesian norms (up to the early 1980s); roll-back neoliberalization in the 1980s; roll-out neoliberalization in the 1990s; and the current phase marked by the triumph of austerity and the financialization of the economy. Building on Mayer’s argument, we analyse the strategies developed by housing activists in Ireland as a response to different waves (and crises) in the neoliberalization of housing. To account for the evolution of the housing sector, we also draw upon the periodization of housing developments proposed by Aalbers (2015) who distinguishes between (a) the pre-modern period; (b) the modern/Fordist period; (c) the flexible neoliberal period; and (d) the late neoliberal/postcrisis one. Chapter 10