ABSTRACT
A conspicuous facet of contemporary capitalism is that more and more people with insufficient or irregular income have become embroiled in a vicious cycle of displacement marked by overindebtedness, rental arrears, evictions and the most violent form of dislocation: homelessness. Rental dwellings, which encompass both social housing and the private rental sector, are places where the majority of Europe’s urban poor not only reside, but also from where they have become displaced with growing intensity over the past two decades. Urban Displacements explores the macro-political economy involved in producing and reproducing everyday poverty that underpins these dislocations in three distinct European cities: Berlin, Vienna and Dublin. To fully investigate and explain urban displacements, we thus need to grasp the problems encountered by tenants in both the spatial relations in which they earn their wages and in the spatial relations in which they consume commodities to survive, such as rent, food, clothing and so forth.
