A Matter of “Co-opportunism”:
(In)Alienability in London Social Housing
PATRICK LAVIOLETTE
Massey University, New Zealand
Abstract
This paper explores the dynamics of temporary urban residency. It looks at the
relationships between domesticity, mobility and improvisational housing – all relevant
to Britain’s housing crisis. Hence, I offer a reﬂexive ethnographic description of
‘short-life’ co-op living based on a ﬁve year account of managing vacant properties that
await refurbishment or re-development by two major Charitable Housing Trusts based
in West London. In questioning how tenants deal with the constant threat of having to
move, I ask how members of a short-life housing co-op create their own sense of self and
stability through a temporary form of accommodation. My goal is thus to investigate
how these co-op tenants appropriate space, relocate themselves and cope with transient
domestic alienability. The creative formulation of individual and community identities
are central to the wider understanding and implications of residential instability,
alternative lifestyles and the general underlying ethos of co-operative organizations.
[Keywords: alternative residency; mobility; co-operatives; opportunism; alienability;
London UK].
Man is the creature of circumstances.
Robert Owen (1813)
W
ith these often cited and contested words, the Welsh utilitarian
and grandfather of the British co-operative movement
reminds us of the importance of opportunism in
deﬁning our very humanity. This paper is about seizing opportunities
and “making do” in the context of the difﬁcult ﬁnancial circumstances
of residing in London for people on low incomes. It is also about
“Reclaiming the Economy” insofar as it explores the vernacular improvisations
within everyday home economics. The paper provides an
City & Society, Vol. 20, Issue 1, pp. 130–149, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X.
© 2008 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-744X.2008.00009.x.
ethnographic and autobiographical account of being part of, and
helping to manage, a small co-operative housing scheme of approximately
forty members. It outlines some of the versatility needed to
cope with an alternative form of short-life tenancy in order to temporarily
obtain social housing through semi-ofﬁcial channels. My objective
is to examine how a small group of West Londoners are involved
with reclaiming the informal economy of vacant, sub-standard properties
whilst these dwellings await refurbishment prior to being redistributed
to their sanctioned Housing Trust tenants. Through a series of
conceptual associations that deal with the ways in which co-op
members negotiate various tensions between alienability and inalienability,
the paper provides a broad overview on a form of transient
urban domesticity. In this sense, it is largely a thought piece on the
nature of what I am calling residential “co-opportunism.”
Methodologically this paper grounds itself in an ethnographic study
with autobiographical undertones (Okely and Callaway 1992; Okely
1996; Radin 1963; Reed-Danahay 1997). Edmund Leach who defended
such an approach towards the end of his life and whose Lancashire
ancestry in Rochdale had such important connections with the onset of
the co-operative movement noted “ethnographers must admit the
reﬂexivity of their activities; they must become autobiographical”
(1987:12). Despite the heightened discourse over reﬂexive issues, it is
remarkable that twenty years later so few anthropologists have produced
autobiographical descriptions of ethnographic scenarios that are of
empirical and political signiﬁcance (Holman-Jones 2005; Norman
2000).
My ﬁeldwork on co-op housing in London involved a participation
in the day to day experiences of an organization to which I belonged as
a member for seven years and was the treasurer for the last ﬁve. This
included sharing ﬂats; accompanying and helping several members in
their relocations; attending administrative meetings, working with the
executives and playing a part in decision making processes; conducting
semi-structured interviews with members; and ﬁnally, keeping a photographic
record and video archive (with the eventual aspiration of collaboratively
making a short documentary ﬁlm).
I initially joined the co-op out of necessity, not with the intention
of studying it. This study is autobiographical in terms of my own circumstances
– I never went to the ﬁeld for this project, it came to me. Yet
within weeks of joining I was already implicating myself as a participant
observer, too tempted by the prospect of better understanding this
unorthodox residential situation.
Many scholars have investigated homelessness and social housing
schemes (Clapham and Kintrea 1991; Cloke and Milbourne 2006;
Fitzpatrick and Pawson 2007). But few anthropologists have been interested
in the co-operative movement (McAllister 2005; Vargas-Cetina
2005) and fewer still have empirically tackled the issue of transient
I initially joined
the co-op out of
necessity, not with
the intention of
studying it
A Matter of
‘Co-opportunism’
131
co-operative residency. Cooper and Rodman’s monograph (1992) on
housing cooperatives in Toronto still remains one of the exceptions. The
present study looks at the relationships between domesticity, mobility
and improvisational housing – all pertinent empirical issues related to
the housing problems of urban areas. In questioning how tenants deal
with the constant threat of having to move, I ask how members of a
short-life housing co-op create their own sense of self and stability
through a temporary form of accommodation. In so doing, I examine how
these co-op tenants appropriate space, relocate themselves and cope with
domestic transience. The question of how people deal with feelings of
alienation in relation to the home has signiﬁcant theoretical precedents
in British social anthropology, especially in the work of Wallman (1984),
Miller (1988; 2001), Rapport and Dawson (1998) and Chapman and
Hockey (1999).
With this background in
mind, I embarked on a personal
reﬂexive ethnographic
description of short-life coop
living and management.
In exploring the complex
dynamics of temporary urban
residency, my conceptual
focus is to understand dwelling
through movement, residency
via relocation and the
reiﬁed conceptualization of
the home vis-à-vis an unstable
but ﬂexible low-cost living
arrangement. I argue that the
tenants are largely domestic
“bricoleurs” and that most
members achieve an inalienable
mastery of movement.
Co-op background
T
he shortage of affordable accommodation in Britain’s cities, especially
in the rented market, has been widely reported in the media
and ofﬁcial government reports and academic analyses (Bramley
et al. 2000; Cave 2007; Evans 1996). A rising interest in the UK’s
housing plight is currently taking place, particularly in London (Smith
et al. 2001). The onset of the present social housing study coincides with
the growing con cern for the sustainability of urban environments which
is at the center of popular attention, not only in the South-East but also
nationally and even internationally (Satterthwaite 1999). There is a
Figure 1. Caption: Sieving through the objects left behind after a member abandoned
his ﬂat (Photo A. Snow, 2005)
City & Society
132
plethora of contradictory information about semi-ofﬁcial forms of social
housing schemes like short-life housing co-ops which provide an alternative
route to accessing cheap and ﬂexible accommodation (Crane and
Warnes 2000; Raimy 1979). The tenants of these types of housing
organizations are often misrepresented in government statistics. They are
seen as homeless and their properties are considered vacant. Or they are
counted as permanent residents in order to understate the number of
dilapidated lodgings or people with no ﬁxed abode. Additionally, these
residents are not able to obtain a level of statutory housing rights
equivalent to those received by similar Council or Trust tenants. Hence,
they are often discriminated against when claiming certain types of
housing beneﬁt and are rarely eligible for the same advantages given to
regular “sitting” tenants.
Of course the tenancy of short-life housing is based on this quid pro
quo model – that is, relatively cheap rent and easy access to what is
generally a highly rigid and formalized housing system at the expense of
limited tenancy rights. Given the legal rights of its sitting tenants and
the complexities of re-housing them as well as the signiﬁcant costs
involved in the structural refurbishment of a large dwelling with many
separate units, several of the more decrepit residences owned by a
Housing Trust will be taken out of ofﬁcial circulation each year once the
tenant voluntarily leaves or dies. To prevent such sub-standard ﬂats
from being vandalized or squatted and to obtain some revenue from
them, most Housing Trusts have devised various management strategies.
These range from leasehold selling through to negotiating short-life
tenancy agreements with housing co-operatives which become Trust
tenants as collectives but whose individual members acceptingly waive
the possibility of being personally recognized as ofﬁcial Trust residents.
As a result, the background of the average short-life co-op member is
not one that originates from the most economically vulnerable sectors
of society. Hence, these people can often afford to opt out or at least
generate alternative means of coping with such constraints. This rather
privileged and voluntary transience of what is effectively a middle class
cohort of residents is a further angle of interest.1
In 1974 the Labour Government’s Housing Act signalled a new era
of expansion for housing associations as publically funded inner city
regeneration agencies. One outcome was the large-scale acquisition of
rundown dwellings from private landlords; the intention being to progressively
upgrade the stock concerned, with access to tenancies subsequently
being determined according to relative housing need (Malpass
2000). Tenant-controlled housing organizations based on co-operative
principles became popular in the wake of these developments. There
was a signiﬁcant propagation in the capital during the 1980s. The co-op
for my case study was set up in 1980/1 by a group of students, many from
Imperial College London who were studying on an MSc course entitled
“Social and Economic Aspects of Science and Technology in Industry.”
The background of
the average
short-life co-op
member is not one
that originates
from the most
economically
vulnerable sectors
of society
A Matter of
‘Co-opportunism’
133
Until recently one of the founding instigators, now a reputable bioengineer,
had listed the following community involvement in his
online CV:
A sideline whilst at Imperial was the development of techniques
for living in luxury at minimal cost! I established a
company – the “X-Housing Co-operative Ltd” – which licensed
squatting, and thus lived in trendy Notting Hill for £3.50 per
week.
This co-op has consistently had between twenty and forty members and
has managed from twenty to thirty properties at any given time.
Members join through word of mouth, often by referral from friends
already in the co-op. There is a rather balanced gender ratio, and the
background of members as far as age, ethnicity and economic diversity
is concerned is remarkably homogenous, consisting almost exclusively
of middle-class, white Anglo-Europeans between the ages of twenty-ﬁve
and forty-ﬁve.
The organization is of “fully mutual” status which means that collectively
the membership provides all skills and resources for its own
administration. It has a formal constitution and rules for members
which have been ofﬁcially registered with the UK’s Friendly Societies
Association (FSA). The founding member quoted above noted in a
recent email to me that:
Being a student collective imparted a fairly radical, antiThatcher
ethos. The funding for Registration under the
Friendly Societies Act came from the College itself, and part of
the impetus came from the Student Welfare Ofﬁcer, both concerned
with the problems of housing students in London. Initially
the houses were from Richmond Churches Housing Trust.
Since the co-op is legally accountable to the FSA through the provision
of an annual ﬁnancial return veriﬁed by a certiﬁed accountant, it is
potentially open to a full audit and its three managing secretaries are
liable for fraud. Other than that, the co-op does not have any dealings
with or obligations to any other ofﬁcial body, save the two Charitable
Housing Trusts in West London from which it acquires its properties.2
This occurs on the basis of temporary let tenancies, with indeﬁnite
agreements on the time spans for the residences. These are predominantly
Victorian terraced ﬂats that range from small studios through to
four-bedroom lodgings. The co-op, which rents directly from these two
Trusts under Licence Agreement, functions as the legal landlord in the
renting of these accommodations. The members act on its behalf as the
custodians of the property in which they live. They are thus responsible
for paying the rent and amenity bills as well as for moving out within a
City & Society
134
minimum notice period of twenty-eight days once the Trust, for whatever
reason, cancels the agreement. Accepting this transience is the
means by which people who are not usually eligible for permanent
accommodation by such Trusts or the local Councils can gain access to
low cost social housing (Pawson et al. 2000).
Presently most members are not students largely because, as the
founding membership ﬁnished university, they began introducing an
older cohort of work colleagues to the co-op. Only recently from my
own involvement as a managing secretary has the co-op’s student
numbers increased from two or three in 2000 to about eight or nine in
2007. A signiﬁcant point about ideology needs to be addressed at this
stage because, in a sense, there is both little regard for the ideological
principles of the co-operative movement amongst the current membership
and too much consolidation of these principles into the opinions
and ideals of a select few. This is relevant since historically the co-op
was founded on strong ideological grounds which were informed by
non-conformity and the rejection of standard socio-political systems,
particularly the ruling Conservative government of the time. Over the
years such ideological positions have substantially shifted and the main
reason most of the recent members get involved is the cheap rent. This
provides an interesting contrast to the work of the urban social geographer
David Ley (1993) on housing co-operatives as moral landscapes.
It is nevertheless clear that current members have a different take on
the alienability of temporary domesticity. For example, Oscar (38), a
veteran of co-op living who works freelance as a media advertising
consultant, remarks about his twelve years of experience:
Nobody likes getting evicted and the constant shifting around
can limit the sort of projects that you get on with where you
live. Things like gardening are harder to commit to if you don’t
Figure 2. Caption: Moving networks (Photo by author, 2000)
A Matter of
‘Co-opportunism’
135
know if you’ll be somewhere for a week or ﬁve years. But for
many of us there’s no doubt, London’s the place to be if we want
to progress in our careers so we have to put up with these kinds
of drawbacks until we crack through or, well, I hate to say it so
bluntly, until we come into some inheritance money.
Co-op members are obviously transient by choice compared to displaced
people. Though, as Oscar reveals, the current situations of
people in this group includes a certain paradoxical degree of “imposed
choice.” Most could not afford to live in London through the more
conventional means of renting or buying. They are choosing to live in
London but there are certain constrains or scenarios whereby this
choice factor is problematic. Some members are somewhat “stuck,” yet
not like forced migrants or the homeless. One point here is to reveal
through examples of this anomalous housing situation that residential
choice is a complex matter. So by couching much of the discussion in
terms of circumstance, (in)alienability and co-operative opportunism,
this paper seeks to address some of these complexities.
Deconstructing the home
I
n earlier years and other cultures, the boundedness of home and
houses was not so readily discernable. Indeed, it had been more
versatile (Buchli et al. 2004). Like the notion of the liberal autonomous
self, to which the house and the home are bound up in Western
traditions, boundaries around the concepts of home and housing are
delineated, manifested and contested in many different ways. Since
these are largely Western constructions, it is worthwhile looking at
ethnographic descriptions to examine contexts that lead to the
“modern” formulation of these notions. Using this term modern, one
should see it in inverted commas as it is worth keeping in mind that
many of the assumptions inherent in concepts we use to found our
arguments can be turned around to reveal a completely different paradigm
(see Latour 1993). This is also the case for how modernity relates
to the social constructions of domesticity and the everyday.
It is important to brieﬂy review and challenge the existing theoretical
literature on the house/home since much of it is founded upon a set of
assumptions about domesticity that urban transient co-op residency
questions and ultimately re-problematizes. The 20th
century modern
model of European housing was intended by its urban bourgeois and
professional creators to provide locations for domestic activities that
would include minimum spaces for eating, cooking, resting, bathing,
socialising and leisure pursuits, while providing basic amenities for
hygiene and health. Undifferentiated space was chaotic and wasteful.
The proposed ideal minimum consisted of a room for family collective
Co-op members
are obviously
transient by choice
compared to
displaced people
City & Society
136
activities (lounge/dinning room), a small efﬁcient kitchen, a bathroom,
and rooms for parents and children of each sex. Many European governments
developed plans for working-class housing schemes that did not
even meet these standards. Through post 2nd
World War mass produced
housing, the home ceased to be a place of production and instead became
a locus of consumption. The domestic was commodiﬁed (Miller 1988).
The notions of house and home have frequently been conﬂated in
recent times by the media as well as the building and real estate industries
as a means of promoting home ownership. The governments of
advanced capitalist economies have actively endorsed the conﬂation of
house, home, and family as part of broader ideological agendas aimed at
increasing economic efﬁciency and growth. There is a shift in European
modernity regarding the welfare state’s burden of responsibility to its
citizens, away from governments towards the home of the nuclear
family. In light of this social restructuring, owner occupied housing has
increased, public housing has decreased and discourses of housing
tenure have started to feature in the meaning of what homes and houses
actually are. Scholars who examine home ownership state that the
abode is a source of identity and status as well as a source of ontological
family security, especially in terms of ﬁnancial investment (Anderson
and Sim 2000).
Amongst the many interesting things that early studies on homelessness
reveal is that home, houses and domesticity are highly contested
places. Indeed, the concept of homelessness raised in Mary
Douglas’s and Aaron Wildavsky’s (1982) work on risk is rich in meanings
and symbolisms. For instance, danger and comfort are simultaneously
present. This hints at the development of hugely important
structuralist approaches in the study of housing such as language-like
models, inﬂuenced by developments in semiotics (Carsten and HughJones
1995; de Saussure 1916). This resulted in the post-structural
interest in deconstructing the notion of home, where dwelling became
an active, not passive, phenomenon (Duncan 1981). House or residence
is where we live, but the concept of home is much more about
how we live.
Home is a process always in the making. It is a constant work in
progress. It is routine and part of the everyday yet also concerned with
the performative in the sense of knowledge being enacted through
action and relationships. Thus, home is always embedded in a series of
tensions. It may evoke security in one context and seem conﬁning in
another. Scholars who employ such an approach in understanding the
meaning of home are not setting up oppositions but dialectics. They
merge tensions to create a new unexpected outcome – unseen pathways
or avenues of thought and experience (Birdwell-Pheasant and
Lawrence-Zuniga 1999; Miller 2001; Pink 2004).
Some of the recent lessons about mobility from phenomenologically
inﬂuenced conceptualizations and approaches are that the comHome
is a process
always in the
making
A Matter of
‘Co-opportunism’
137
plexities and dialectics of the domestic arena grows in terms of dealing
with concerns for the embedded and the embodied (Winstanley et al.
2002). Delineating the domestic in a phenomenological framework is a
deliberate attempt to map out the life-paths of human beings as a
progressive move from “home” to “world,” or from hearth to cosmos as
the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1996) says. With time, people grow into a
larger world. In all cultures, one’s stages of maturation are celebrated,
because at each stage one enters into larger spheres of activity, responsibility
and mastery (Jackson 1995). A judgment against patriarchal
societies is that women are made to stay in the domestic realm. Similarly,
a judgment against hierarchical societies is that members of the
lower classes are conﬁned to limited spheres of interaction and subjected
to forced migrations, while elites have the possibility of enjoying
the world without the fear of forced displacement. They are privileged
in being both cosmopolitan and grounded (de Beauvoir 1964). The
ideals of co-operative societies seek to extend this privilege to more and
more members who once suffered constraint but no longer need to feel
that the edge of their home is the edge of their world.
This link, I argue exists between a co-operative ethos and a phenomenological
approach, is one that emphasizes empathy. It highlights
a concern for being sensitive towards, and thus drawing attention to,
people’s negative experiences. Thinking in terms of embodiment and
agency, the notions of forgetting things as well as the ritual destruction
of home have been important in debates about domestic spaces (Bartlett
1932; Forty and Küchler 1999). Ideas about alternative homes such
as squatting, house-sitting, narrow boats or barges, caravans and traveller
settlements have also been debated (Aiken 1981; Okely 1982;
Smart 1985). I situate this paper in these discussions that strive to
understand the social signiﬁcances of alternative housing schemes.
A recent example of highlighting potential inequalities and injustices
in the home sphere comes out of considerations for the surveillance
or panoptical effects of so-called technologies of well-being
(Laviolette and Hanson 2007). Wardhaugh’s (1999) work on women’s
homelessness in Wales is another case. The home then becomes the site
where the ego is not only produced but is also contested. Moral subjects
are forged, represented, enacted, pathologized, witnessed and judged.
Similarly, the focus of interest shifts towards what is taken for granted,
the mundane. The everyday is a site of social importance and so are
objects that are discarded, not noticed or ridiculed as trivial and meaningless.
Wallpaper and waste are heralded for their primal cultural
signiﬁcance. They have as much signiﬁcance as artefacts said to be
powerful, spiritual or special.
The notion of the agency of things is crucial (Gell 1998). In the
study of built form, scholars have given precedence to architecture as an
end in itself once the physical realization of the design has occurred. In
“How Buildings Learn,” Stuart Brand (1994) laments this myopic perCity
& Society
138
spective. Inspired by a material culture perspective that takes seriously
the histories and agencies of artefacts, he points out the complex social
lives of architectural realizations, the biography of buildings.
Share and share dislike
I
t is interesting when anthropologists share informants, particularly
when they are not working in the same ﬁeld site. This happened when
Liz, who had introduced me to the housing co-op, became the informant
for a colleague, Jean-Sébastien Marcoux,3
who had worked on
house moving. Liz was a member of the housing co-op in question since
her undergraduate days in the early 1990s. She had moved out of the
co-op for several years when she went to live in Africa. She later
returned to the co-op in the late 1990s. When Liz found out that I had
been living with a friend in Northampton upon returning from ﬁeldwork
in Cornwall because I could not afford London, she told me about
the co-op. I attended a few meetings and eventually got a short term ﬂat
in Hammersmith with four other students. Several months later we lost
this ﬂat and I had to move into a smaller two bedroom ﬂat in Shepherd’s
Bush which I shared with one other member. Liz had received a “Notice
to Quit” on her place the previous month and had just temporarily
moved in with us. We agreed that she would move into the new place
with me, especially since we had no particular desire of living with
either of the four others who would also need re-housing. The new ﬂat,
which the co-op was told would last for some time, was offered to us for
a number of reasons: our quick decision of accepting to live together; Liz
was a long term member who had just had the bad luck of having to
move the previous month; and ﬁnally I would speculate that I was
shown some favouritism because of the imminent departure of the co-op
treasurer – a role (it would soon become clear) that I was being set up
for and soon assumed.
Jean-Sébastien and his partner Hélène helped me clean, paint and
set up the new ﬂat. Once it was ready, after an intense week of physical
labor, Liz helped me move my things with her car. She had a change of
heart a couple of days later, when it was time for her to move. She had
a difﬁcult time writing and re-adjusting to London so decided to pack in
her Ph.D. and return to Africa where her partner was still living. As she
prepared to move her things into the loft of her mother’s house, I
assisted. Jean-Sébastien was also nominally invited because she knew
him enough to realize his professional interest in the moving process
(Marcoux 2001; 2004). She quickly became a source of information for
him. She also became an interesting hindsight informant for my own
co-op project because she ended up revealing a certain disinterest in the
signiﬁcance of short-life dwellings.
A Matter of
‘Co-opportunism’
139
Some residents see such ﬂats as disposable commodities which
become alienable forms of accommodation (Weiner 1992). Moving
into them is downplayed and internal moves (from one co-op ﬂat to
another) are taken for granted. These types of residences are obviously
different and Liz’s departure was articulated as a serious event, a lifelong,
lifestyle choice. Wallman (1998) suggests that such moves away from
the co-op become a move away from one opportunity towards another.
Yes, it was something she had done before when she had left earlier. But
there is a sense in the co-op that leaving burns certain bridges, that
there are many diminishing returns. Liz’s move was indicative of accepting
a considerable change of circumstances.
What happened to me after this can be summarized as a series of fairly
rapid ﬂatmate transitions for the next three years. Some I got on well with
and others less so. The ﬁrst, a revived dandy and shoe maker, ﬁts into the
latter category mostly because he moved his elderly father into the ﬂat
after about a month without ofﬁcially advising the co-op. He had initially
said that it was a temporary measure but months passed. Only when
Jean-Sébastien joined the co-op and moved in for a few months before his
return to Montreal,4
Gene did ask his father to ﬁnd another place. The
two new ﬂatmates did not get on especially well either. One night
Jean-Sébastien left a note about washing-up etiquette on a dirty saucepan
for Gene to discover upon his inebriated return at 3:00am. The next
morning, with both of them mysteriously absent, I awoke to ﬁnd a
bloodied stage-prop foot in the same saucepan). Soon Gene was offered
his own ﬂat which he had requested even before this incident.
When Jean Sébastien left London a couple of months later, I ended
up hosting one of his acquaintances who wanted to do some research in
London. Jill (28) had recently completed her M.A. and was exploring
options for further study. She noted about her desire to join the co-op:
Although I need some private space to sleep, be alone, be with
people, be untidy, I don’t really need sole use of a kitchen,
bathroom, washing machine, etc. I’d prefer the next phase of
my life to be about shedding rather than accumulating these
kind of things, and putting time, income and attention into
creating a home with other people who don’t have to be the
same age as me, nor does it matter if they’re single or couples.
I’ve lived communally in various ways at different times –
generally that’s been very enjoyably. I’m also aware that the
conventional wisdom about property ownership, mortgages and
long term planning doesn’t really work for me [. . .] and provides
a route to security which in any case is not available to a huge
number of people.
She seemed to neatly ﬁt the co-operative ethos. Her interests in poverty
issues and social welfare lent themselves to thinking about the co-op as
Some residents
see such ﬂats
as disposable
commodities which
become alienable
forms of
accommodation
City & Society
140
a potential research project. Eventually we began interviewing some
co-op members to ﬁnd out more about their backgrounds and to draw up
inventories of possessions and movements. Unfortunately, due to difﬁculties
in coping with London and ﬁnding out about a serious family
matter, Jill returned home.
Upon the recommendation of a friend Toby (27) moved in and
stayed for six months. Nothing signiﬁcant occurred to sour the living
relationship with him. Toby was not very concerned with co-operative
values. When Darren (41) a long term member who had been unlucky
enough to lose three ﬂats within the year, needed a space, Toby considered
a ﬂat we had been offered in White City which was close to his
work.
However, he decided to move out of the co-op altogether at the
prospect of future transience. Since this is the main framework for the
functioning of the co-op, I was not forthcoming in suggesting that our
ﬂat could be stretched into accommodating three people (which it had
in the past) and that he could stay if he wanted. This example reveals
one of the constraints that weigh upon members: they are forced to
change places, live a transient way of life, and they might also frequently
change ﬂatmates. The domestic includes different types of
social relations, some internal, some external and others in between
given the dynamics of the co-op which means that estranged members
might become ﬂatmates.
Move and improve
A
nother interesting example of moving and co-op decision making
concerns a one-bedroom basement ﬂat in the West London
borough of Fulham. Nathan, in his late thirties, was the single
occupant there for about four years. Fairly unexpectedly, he announced
to the co-op that he had had enough of London and was moving to the
Dorset countryside within a fortnight. He paid all his bills and returned
the keys in early December 2004. Just a short time before the Christmas
holidays, things were quiet and we could not arrange a replacement
until the second week of January. Nathan had explained that the boiler
pipes had recently been leaking and that a crack in the kitchen roof
extension which he had mended a couple of years previously had
reopened and was occasionally letting in water during extensive rain
fall. At the beginning of the New Year I contacted Terry, a friend in his
early forties who had been my football coach at college. We had discussed
the co-op on occasion in the past and he had always been keen
for a cheaper place. But as an unfurnished single ﬂat at £300 a month
plus bills, this was not much less than Terry’s current furnished bed-sit.
His ears perked up, however, when he found out that the option was in
Fulham since he had recently joined the community program of the
However, he
decided to move
out of the co-op
altogether at
the prospect of
future transience
A Matter of
‘Co-opportunism’
141
Fulham Football Club. I proposed that the place would be cheaper if he
agreed to share it with another college student who had recently shown
interest. Terry agreed to have a look. We visited the place in the third
week of January, now about six weeks after the keys had been returned.
The ﬂat smelt of considerable moisture and was ﬂooded in some
areas. The crack in the kitchen roof had worsened from the month’s
neglect and was letting in a considerable amount of water, as was the
leaky pipe from the boiler. Terry nevertheless agreed to take the ﬂat if
Alan, the student, was also interested. The rent would then drop to
£230 each a month and the bills would be shared. He proceeded to try
to end his lease early. A week later Alan (37) also saw the place and
agreed to move in temporarily, until something else came up. His main
interest was joining the co-op and knew that “this is a good ﬁrst step,
even if it means roughing it a little.” They agreed to move in by
mid-February because Terry wanted two more weeks to strip the walls
from the front living room which he had claimed as his room because it
was larger than the bedroom. This wall suffered considerably from rising
damp, but he felt he could mend that. They inquired whether the co-op
could pay to have the leaky kitchen roof sorted out.
The membership secretary Phil agreed that something could be
arranged to ﬁx this without involving professionals but rather by using
the expertise of co-op members. Phil, who had changed his career from
being a TEFOL teacher to painting and decorating, decided that he
and I could do a makeshift patch up. We spent a fairly dry early
February afternoon doing this. He knew exactly which products to buy
and how to lift the tarred felt roof cover to locate the crack. We
returned during a subsequent rainy morning to ﬁnd that the leak had
been successfully stopped. There was now, however, a gaping mouldy
dank hole in the kitchen ceiling which Phil suggested could be sorted
out by the two new tenants with some chicken wire and plaster. I
nodded knowingly but without the foggiest idea about how they could
go about this.
After a few days Terry had de-plastered the dampest wall in his room
down to the bricks. But one day just before they were to move in, Alan
found the room completely ransacked with torn painted wallpaper, chip
board and plaster dust lying everywhere. Finding the task beyond his
patience and DIY abilities, Terry had abandoned his refurbishing plans
and rang me up to discuss pulling out of the whole deal. Something else
had also come up in his life – an opportunity in the summer to go to
America as a college soccer trainer. He would not need the ﬂat for long
enough to warrant any more repairs and decided “mate, it makes more
sense to put my things into storage now and couch surf for a few months.
I’m sorry ‘bout this but I really need this job and have too much to do
before going to deal with this ﬂat”.
Fortunately I could tell him that it was not a serious problem.
Another friend from college, Jim, a temporarily unemployed researcher,
The ﬂat smelt of
considerable
moisture and was
ﬂooded in some
areas
City & Society
142
had expressed an interest in a co-op ﬂat, although he was taken aback
by the sight of this place. He accepted to move in with Alan, with the
stipulation of it being a temporary measure. About six months later an
interesting opportunity presented itself which would require a complicated
series of relocations. The co-op was offered two large and fairly
nice ﬂats in Notting Hill. The biggest, a three bedroom ﬂat, would be
ideal for Alan and Jim plus one of their mutual friends who was hoping
to join. Who, however, would then take the decrepit Fulham ﬂat? The
co-op toyed with the idea of returning it to the Trust as uninhabitable.
This, however, is something that we always tried to avoid because we
did not want to give the impression that we are not able to ﬁnd needy
tenants. Phil explained this on several occasions at our regular meetings
(every six weeks). The words he used on one occasion struck me “we
need to be seen as always hungry.”
Then my ﬂatmate Darren returned from his annual four month stint
in Nicaragua. We had always got on ﬁne but he had moved in as a
temporary emergency measure because the co-op lost his ﬂat the year
previously. He had always said that “ultimately I’d like my own place
again since I’m a loner, quite stuck in my ways and used to having my
own space.” He was away for a few weeks when the Fulham ﬂat ﬁrst
came up so had missed that opportunity. But when the chance presented
itself again, he was thrilled to take it, despite its condition. Having been
involved with the co-op for about ﬁfteen years Darren was one of the
longest term members. He is from a well-to-do professional family but
has never wanted to buy into mainstream society. He has been a landscape
gardener in West London since leaving school, Eton no less. He
is happier working for himself, earning around £12,000 a year and not
being accountable to anybody. His solitary work-life is mirrored in his
retiring home-life. When he was given the choice he has always opted
to live on his own, even if this meant moving ﬂats unnecessarily, even
into places which are more substandard than the average co-op property.
I had the opposite attitude. Having seen the new two bedroom ﬂat
in Notting Hill, I too thought that I could move. The area and ﬂat were
much nicer than the current place in Shepherd’s Bush, and I could
move in with whomever I chose. This would leave our two-bed ﬂat
available for two people from our waiting list who wanted to share.
Everyone agreed that this made much more sense than splitting them up
by ﬁtting one of them in with me and the other alone in Notting Hill.
Four people where relocated and four new people joined the co-op and
everyone got what they wanted.
All that was needed for this win – win situation was some ﬂexibility
and spontaneity in relation to residential mobility which is not often
provided in the mainstream rented market. This is nurtured in this
short-life housing co-op through a membership which by necessity is
accustomed to transience. Only the assumption, that one does not
move unless one has to, needed to be overcome. This was done through
A Matter of
‘Co-opportunism’
143
discussing options, a process available to this small community. Some
payoffs and the cutting of corners, however, occur: carpets are removed
but not replaced, ﬂoorboards are painted but not sanded or stained,
walls are painted but rarely ceilings. Yet due to the necessary domestic
improvements involved in co-op living and the indeterminate length of
time that they will live in a ﬂat, such tenants are constantly engaged in
producing homes for themselves in ways that differ from what the
average tenant experiences.
Conclusion
I
n anthropological work about mobility and housing, a distinction can
be seen between residential ﬂux (where one lives) and social ﬂux (with
whom). In the case of short-life co-ops this distinction is very useful.
By examining the changes of addresses, the pressure to move that weigh
upon the co-op members, the (desired/forced) displacements, we have
witnessed certain changes in residential ﬂux. It is important to point out
that even though moving is a constant threat, residential relocations are
not constantly occurring. Rather, there is a signiﬁcant turnover of
ﬂatmates internally. Perhaps, this is where the distinction between the
residential and the social ﬂux is useful. It reminds us that there are many
inalienable social relocations within the co-op itself. The examples
described above are about the versatility needed to negotiate domestic
relocation. They show ways of fostering a system of “accommodating”
improvisation. In order to improve their longer term circumstances,
co-op members seize and appropriate certain housing opportunities that
are made more or less hap-hazardously available to them. In doing so,
they reduce their level of alienation from producing their own accommodation.
In other words, the opportunity of house moving here can be
seen as work on the home – a way of adding value to an available and
under exploited resource within the social housing sector, even if this
resource is sub-standard and ﬂeeting because the time span on it is
unpredictable.
There is another interpretation, one opposed to the idea of creative
opportunistic “home building” that I described. Here the very notion of
home as a haven is problematic (Brindley 1999; Blunt and Dowling
2006). Possibly, home is what certain co-op members are not attempting
to construct by virtue of their transience. In such a case, home is
situated elsewhere or put on hold altogether. Regardless, co-op members
are actively involved in at least producing temporary residences for
themselves, even if they do not conceive of these ephemeral spaces as
“homes.” By examining house moving it is possible to emphasize methodological
concerns which are less concerned with the discursive, and
focus on practice instead. Being rather indifferent as to why people
moved, this work opens up the possibility for thinking about questions
Possibly, home is
what certain co-op
members are not
attempting to
construct by virtue
of their transience
City & Society
144
as to how they do so. Who does what and when? How are tasks administered?
Which objects do they leave behind? What social networks of
assistance are called upon, spontaneously generated or ruptured through
the event? All these are interesting questions in situations like short-life
housing co-ops where the reason for moving is usually predetermined
by outside sources. Additionally, although moving house in the co-op
might be much more frequent than in the private sector, it is still
experienced as a stressful occurrence that is both intensely physical and
highly emotional.
This case study explored the dynamics of alienation and asked how
tenants performed their senses of inalienable belonging through
moving and short-term habitation (Rapport and Dawson 1998). My
larger goal is to apply some of these lessons to an investigation of the
general underlying ethos of co-operative organizations. Such a study
would help raise the proﬁle that such accommodation schemes have in
alleviating the economic housing strain for people with alternative
lifestyles. Returning to Marx’s (1887) ideological concerns through the
lens of the introductory quotation by Robert Owen, this paper exposed
some of the relationships between circumstance and the notions of
domestic alienability and inalienability. Despite being largely marginalized
in contemporary residential terms, tenants of housing co-ops
such as the one described here, have regained a sense of creativity and
improvisation, if not production, over the means of procuring dwellings
for themselves. This situation demonstrates ways in which they have
reiﬁed co-opportunism and truly revealed their colors as creatures of
circumstance.
Notes
Acknowledgments. This paper was initially written for the conference
“Reclaiming the Economy: the Role of Cooperative Enterprise, Ownership
and Control,” Sept 6-8, 2006. I am grateful to the participants for their
insightful comments as well as to the organizers at the Wales Institute for
Research into Co-operatives, University of Wales in Cardiff. A longer revised
version was presented at the “Archaeology Seminar Series” at Lampeter University
on 18 October 2006. Again thanks to the participants and seminar
convenor Samantha Hurn for inviting me to contribute. K. O’Connor, A.
Drazin, A. Hecht, P. Garvey, P. Weinberg and particularly J.S. Marcoux have
equally provided invaluable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts, as
have the referees for City & Society. I also wish to acknowledge the institutional
and ﬁnancial support of the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies,
Faculty of the Built Environment, University College London, where I was
based during the initial formulation of this paper. Finally I’d like to thank the
members of the co-op in question for their help with both housing and
research.
A Matter of
‘Co-opportunism’
145
1
The idea of “voluntary transience” exists in the comparative context
whereby situations of imposed transience come to afﬂict asylum seekers, environmental
refugees and other forced migrants in different ways.
2
Most UK housing Trusts are non-proﬁt registered charities. Many were set
up by wealthy philanthropists in the early to mid-20th
century to alleviate the
socio-economic conditions of the working classes by provision of dwellings and
community organizations.
3
All names are pseudonyms except for Jean-Sébastien Marcoux who gave
his consent.
4
Jean Sébastien and Hélene were expelled from their student accommodation
which was scheduled for refurbishment prior to being sold. Hélene
moved in for only a couple of weeks before rerunning to Montreal in advance
of him.
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