Slow violence
Violence is often understood as a highly visible act, as a newsworthy event bound in time and space. In relation to housing, violence is often associated with evictions. Yet, such focus overshadows other forms of violence that take place “gradually and out of sight”, and involve a “delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”
The notion of slow violence was first introduced by Rob Nixon in relation to environmental destruction, drawing on the work of postcolonial scholars and activists to reframe our understanding of violence. Slow violence captures violence that is not spectacular and sudden, but rather incremental and at times invisible. Related to property, slow violence includes the state’s dismantling of social housing, urban dispossession, gentrification and displacement. The “temporal dispersion of slow violence” and its “delayed effects” impact how we perceive such violence or how, sometimes, we do not recognise it at all. The concept of slow violence, therefore, can be useful in providing us with language to address the challenges in representing the multi-faceted nature of violence.
In the United Kingdom, slow violence in asylum accommodation reflects how racism penetrates property regimes through continuous, everyday forms of violence and neglect, placing racialised and working-class residents at risk of harm, injury and premature death. Analysing Britain’s asylum accommodation through the lens of slow violence shows not only that the violence experienced by residents can be gradual and invisible to the public, but also that the residents themselves are often invisibilised while their knowledge is erased. The racist violence experienced in asylum accommodation is often perpetrated through policies and practices that are neither spectacular nor unusual, but rather operate in a strategic and mundane way.
Slow violence is also a useful concept to describe the neglect and dismantling of the social housing system in the Netherlands. Over the course of decades, social housing corporations have consistently neglected their responsibility to maintain and invest in their properties. Consequently, residents find themselves disillusioned with the substandard housing they endure. The structural neglect weighs so heavily on their mental and physical health that the announcement of demolition might even be met with a sense of relief, despite uncertainty regarding their next housing destinations.
In Greece, slow violence manifests as chronic housing pressure and insecurity. On the one hand, mortgaged homeowners were victims of a horizontal and enforced decrease in incomes, which led about half of them to default on their mortgage repayments. Since then, they have been experiencing housing insecurity, as their properties are liable to be repossessed. Temporary foreclosure moratoriums have delayed repossession but have not provided a permanent remedy, thus prolonging uncertainty and the inability of households to plan ahead. On the other hand, due to uncontrolled rent increases, tenants experience the greatest housing cost overburden in Europe, often taking up over 60% of household expenditures. Due to the absence of any institutional protection, this situation presents a challenge both for low and middle-income households, who are obliged to cut down on other essential expenses such as food, education and healthcare in order to keep up with housing costs.
The slow violence of property is visible across all types of landlords in San Francisco. Corporate landlords, who buy apartment buildings and rely on the renovation of vacant units to increase the rental revenue of their investors, often leave the existing tenants to suffer the noise and health hazards of non-stop construction, first on the floor above them, then on the floor below, then next door. In housing owned or operated by the municipality, residents face long and convoluted bureaucratic procedures and are dependent on the unpredictability of election cycles to meet their basic needs. Private individuals who buy properties may start eviction procedures against long-term tenants (whether successful or not) causing extreme distress as they face the prospect of losing their homes and communities. In all cases the unpredictability and powerlessness of the tenants leave them living in a perpetual state of uncertainty.
In the wake of the global financial crisis, Spain’s housing market has perpetuated a form of slow violence against non-EU citizens. Quantitative analyses carried out for this project show that, compared to Spanish citizens, EU and non-EU citizens in Spain faced a higher prevalence of objective and subjective indicators of housing precariousness at the height of the housing crash, including overcrowding, structural damage, high financial burden of housing costs, inadequate plumbing, and inability to maintain proper temperatures. Meanwhile, displacement pressure and higher degrees of housing precariousness were systematically more likely to be experienced by non-EU citizens, even after controlling for characteristics such as age, sex, educational level, income, tenure status and missed housing payments. This greater exposure to slow violence made non-EU citizens more susceptible to rent extraction, as they were also found to pay significantly more rent than Spaniards for similar dwellings.
REFERENCES
Cahill, C., & Pain, R. (2019). Representing slow violence and resistance: On hiding and seeing. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 18(5), 1054-1065.
Elliott-Cooper, A., Hubbard, P. and Lees, L. (2020) ‘Moving beyond Marcuse: Gentrification, displacement and the violence of un-homing’, Progress in Human Geography, 44(3), pp. 492–509.
Kern, L. (2016) Rhythms of gentrification: Eventfulness and slow violence in a happening neighbourhood. Cultural Geographies, 23(3), pp. 441–457.
Nixon, R. (2011) Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Pain, R. (2019) ‘Chronic urban trauma: The slow violence of housing dispossession’, Urban Studies, 56(2), pp. 385–400.
