Terror on The body: exploring social housing decline though Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics

Hollie Douglas [ Email ] [ Linkedin ]

This paper examines the extremities and deaths resulting from the declining standards and safety of UK social housing through the lens of Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics. It explores the connections between urban racism, spatial inequality, and the ways in which people of colour are often made to feel unwelcome within urban spaces. Building on this foundation, the paper argues that varying degrees of citizenship influence decision-making processes regarding the care—or neglect—of social housing tenants. It highlights how state neglect becomes evident through material decay and systemic violence inflicted on the bodies of specific citizens, leading to physical harm and slow deaths. Furthermore, the paper underscores the material impacts of this neglect on the body. However, it also acknowledges the power of activism, amplified through social media, which resists the silencing of these marginalized voices and challenges governmental inaction.

Introduction

In this essay, I will explore the decline in social housing and its effects on inhabitants through the framework of Achille Mbembe’s (2019) theory of necropolitics. This essay is a response to declining standards and quality of social housing which have been vocalised by residents and community groups. I argue that these injustices are examples of state violence that are enacted on often the most vulnerable citizens. As much as this is a question of power, social class, and race, it is a question of the impact of these factors on citizenship and human rights. Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics is often cited in contemporary debate as the cause of environmental injustice and racism, for its effect on the body and consequential slow death. In his argument of necropolitics, Mbembe questions “under what practical conditions is the power to kill, to let live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right?” (2019: 66). As a result of this definition it’s possible to suggest how often race-based structural inequality has led to worsening social housing conditions and deaths, as seen in the cases of Grenfell Tower residents in 2017 and toddler Awaab Ishak in 2020. I have chosen not to include images of these cases so as not to contribute further to visualisation of the traumas that surviving families may still face ( however this has been carefully revised for the publishing of this paper). I will attempt to demonstrate how space is racialised by governments and the effects of this on the body by looking at determinations of citizenship. This essay will aim to draw links between how the dysfunction and decay of materials in buildings can have life-altering effects on the body. I suggest that the government's lack of care for certain people manifests itself as a lack of care for the buildings they inhabit and the infrastructures that support their everyday lives, through infrastructural violence. Lastly, I will look at how communities are mobilising themselves against necropower, austerity, and poor social housing conditions

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Building an environment of terror: Race, place and space

In the cases of recorded deaths that have taken place due to unsatisfactory social housing standards, many victims have been from Black, Asian, and minority ethnic backgrounds. In this section of the essay, I will look at how race and space interlink within built environments and social housing, resulting in social injustice. Greater London Authority (GLA) has suggested that due to economic disparities and the rising costs of the UK housing market, black and minority ethnic Londoners are in most need of social housing (Gleeson, 2022). The systemic inequality not only echoes the lack of recourse to housing but also the disparity between areas. Areas with higher house prices are usually associated with higher standards of living for example, better schools, cleaner environments, and less crime. Therefore, as the report stated, it is due to lack of home ownership and disposable income that black and brown people are less likely to have access to these amenities (ibid). As a result, they become victims of the social housing system in what can be seen as a cycle of systemic inequality and thus racism. I draw attention to this as 85% of the deaths that took place in the Grenfell Tower fire were people of colour. Geographies and space are important in how inhabitants of a city can class themselves amongst others. From the data above, it shows how black and brown bodies are often most in need of social housing and care from the state. I argue this makes them the most vulnerable to state violence. 

Drawing on Megan Nethercote’s (2022) notion of ‘unhoming’, I suggest it is a process through which marginalised communities are dispossessed on the grounds of property and housing. Nethercote claims “Unhoming denies and depletes one’s capacities to settle – it assimilates, endangers, and deadens racialized subjects as it renders their homes unsafe, insecure, or precarious” (945).Through the government's discernment of people of color as unworthy, unhoming reiterates the sentiment that some people do not belong. Belonging describes the ‘personal intimate feelings of being 'at home’ in a place’ (Lähdesmäki et al. 2022). Through the lens of necropolitics, this entertains questions about who has the right to belong within a home. It is through land, housing, and urban planning that minority populations have often been controlled and racial violence has been enacted, through practices such as zoning and segregation (Hirokawa, 2023). Although these are practices that have largely occurred in America, it is a relevant example of how coloniality and sovereignty are expressed through the built environment. Mel Nowicki (2023) argues using the concept of domicide as ‘the intentional destruction of home’ to describe the events of Grenfell and the overarching way in which politics of austerity has incited the removal of people from their homes (5). 

I argue it is through creating racialised spaces and enclaves, that inescapable inequality forms and governments become negligent. Although class was also a factor in the Grenfell fire, the racialisation of particular geographies is evident in the historical and present-day realities of West London. During the period of Windrush migration which saw people from the commonwealth travelling to the UK to fill post-war labour shortages, Notting Hill and surrounding areas in West London became appealing for its cheaper housing provision. It was an area that was famous for fraught race relations, deprivation, and criminality (Pile 2021). Grenfell Tower was designed to epitomise modern block living by accommodating lots of people through cheaper housing provision (ibid). The demography of the area surrounding Grenfell is an example of what Dan Bulley describes as the dual process of “Migration and segregation” where big cities attract “migrants in from the Global South and shelter them in diverse communities where they can be contained and neglected, separated from the super-wealthy by invisible barriers” (Bulley 2019: 8). Furthermore, feelings of desertion were felt by tenants of Grenfell in 2016 when it was at risk of demolition. One tennant Edward Darffarn stated ‘They call[ed] Lancaster West (Grenfell) the forgotten estate. And it has been called the forgotten estate for the last couple of years’ (Darffarn cited in Gras, 2016). This suggests how neglect was not only something that was witnessed through material dilapidation and decline but was felt by its inhabitants. I argue that through housing, people are further racialised, space and place are racialised–through the idea of 'home' for many individuals living in social housing. Consequently, the precarious nature of already racialised lives, becomes even more endangered through the homes in which they exist.  

Citizenship and infrastructural violence

Following on from the argument above, for people to be disregarded they must be classed as other, or deemed unworthy by governments first. In the cases of Grenell and Awaab Ishak, most of the affected victims were from migrant backgrounds. Mbembe (2019) argues that throughout time a set of specific rules have been created for people who are seen as illegal and therefore disposable (12). Subsequently these rules can allow spatial violence to transgress and real violence against these bodies to take place (ibid). Infrastructures reveal political intention, their materiality reveals structural violence within urban environments and exposes the networking of city planners, architects, and governments and how they can contribute to social suffering (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012). An example of how governments use infrastructure against citizens is Denmark, where new legislation implemented in 2018 to rehouse people as a form of social cleansing. The policy titled ‘One Denmark without Parallel Societies: No ghettos 2030,’ has arguably targeted low-income and ethnic minority families and people. One resident Muhammad Aslam stated “The cornerstone of democracy is that we are equal before the law, but that is the stone they are pushing [away] with this legislation”(cited in John and Gargiulo, 2020: para 7). The issue here is that governments exercise the power to both build and tear down walls that house their citizens. Thus infrastructure is relational in that it provides a framework for how people can exist, to a point where lived experience and citizenship are taken into question (Power and Mee, 2019). When infrastructural inequality and violence are enacted, those deemed as improper citizens are denied rights in the countries they reside and their existence becomes perilous. 

If infrastructure ‘shapes how people relate to the city and each other, affecting where and how people and things move across time and space’ (Rodgers and O’Neill 2012: 403), then infrastructural violence facilitates how people who are othered experience the city. According to the literature around infrastructural violence, it is determined by the value that people are given through contributions to capitalist society, as such they are deemed either disposable or important (Galtung 1969, Rodgers and O’Neill 2012, Mbembe 2023). Rodgers and O’Neill (2012) differentiate between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ infrastructural violence. The former notes a direct and intentional result, the latter a byproduct of infrastructural failure (407). The fire at Grenfell was not an isolated event, but an accumulation of building failures and negligent fire safety regulations. Stuart Hodkinson argues that the atrocities of the Grenfell fire should be classed as “social murder”: capitalism's creation of premature deaths of the working class due to poor living conditions (2019, 5). The Grenfell Tower report produced in June 2017, stated: 

‘The building was constructed of reinforced concrete, to which there had recently been added a cladding system comprising insulation boards attached to the outside of the concrete structure and protected from the weather by aluminium composite material rainscreen panels. The rainscreen panels contained a polyethylene core. Polyethylene is a highly combustible substance’ (GT ENQUIRY, 2019: 3). 

This cladding was introduced through refurbishments which took place over the tower from 2012-2016. Where the walls from floors 4 to 23 were re-clad and given new ventilation screens, floors 1-3 were not re-clad in the same material and were not involved in the fire (‘Phase 1 Report | Grenfell Tower Inquiry’, n.d.). I point this out to demonstrate how materiality is the starting point of infrastructural violence, in the case of Grenfell Tower it was undeniably the cause of the fire. It reveals how neoliberal policies and increased privatisation have resulted in inconsistencies within public health and safety regulations (Hodkinson, 2019). 

Returning to the concept of active and passive structural violence (Rodgers and O’Neill 2012), it is evident how the systematic and systemic failure of the government to ensure the safety of its citizens has caused death. Where there have been previous examples of fires in social housing buildings, they have been caused by flammable cladding and poor fire regulation (Kernick 2021). Gill Kernick argues that ‘buildings are generally overclad to improve their appearance and or/ environmental performance’ (2021:16). Therefore I suggest that housing in this sense cannot be seen as an infrastructure of care (Power and Mee 2020), as demonstrated through the failure of housing governance to use safe materials when choosing cladding. If Care as infrastructure is linked to the infrastructure of the home, then it contributes to a sense of belonging. Furthermore, as observed by Hobart and Kneese (2020) ‘care is unevenly distributed and cannot be disentangled from structural racism and inequality’ (8, cited in Ortiz and Boano, 2020). Arguably infrastructural aesthetics have been substituted for infrastructural care, whereby the form is favoured over function (Larkin, 2018). I would argue that infrastructural violence negates care for those who are not classed as citizens. Grenfell and its immediate surrounding areas of a social housing estate had to be seen as unimportant and inconvenient by the local council to beautify the tower blocks. Additionally, it shows how the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea had its wealthier residents in mind. This further proves how these citizens ‘are, strictly speaking, bodies at the limits of life, trapped in uninhabitable worlds and inhospitable places’ (Mbembe, 2019: 10) –walls designed to protect become active violent infrastructures in trapping vulnerable people and residents within.

Sensorial politics and state neglect

In this section, I suggest how the body is affected through sensorial politics, slow violence ( Nixon 2011, Davidson and Brash 2021), and necropolitical acts of state neglect. Although rooted in environmental inequality, ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) is useful in thinking about how the conditions of poverty affect the body, which is violently impacted by the environment at the hands of neoliberal governments. Rob Nixon (2011) argues it is “violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). I believe it is therefore possible to develop links between slow violence and the slow deaths that have occurred within UK social housing. In the same way that social cleansing is a form of slow violence as it dispossesses ethnic minority people (Lees and Hubbard 2020), it emphasises their vulnerability to the changes that take place within social housing. If these acts of violence are long drawn-out processes of suffering, then it begs to question the extent to which these bodies are seen as fragile and human. This is an example of how infrastructure becomes weaponised to a point where ‘it can give life as well as take it away’ (Lesutis and Kaika, 2024: 2). The death of the 2-year-old Awaab Ishak in Rochdale as a result of the respiratory problems he developed from mould in his social housing flat, exemplifies how neoliberal policies have affected the ability to dwell. Megan Kane’s (2023) ethnography documents the production of mould as an effect of austerity on housing. Kane suggests that mould is a foreign intrusion within people's homes, and as such, it has an affective impact on how it takes over their belongings (ibid.). Kane’s ethnography evidences the way mould infiltrates the lives of people in visible and invisible ways. 

The ability to breathe, which is seen as such a simple act, has most recently been linked to inequality in the lack of access to clean air by deprived communities (Davidson and Brash, 2021). This has been emphasised in the death of Ella Kissi-Debrah in South London, who was the first person to have her cause of death stated as pollution (Laville, 2020). Not only does her death show how in similar ways government inaction has resulted in the death of children, but also how these problems have affected children of colour specifically. This is not only a case of how outdoor air quality persists in ruining lives, but how indoor air quality, through poor housing provision, can be just as dangerous. I argue that the health problems that derive from mould, complicit in slow death, are an example of slow violence. The ability for people to breathe or not is also concerned with Mbmembe’s necropower as Magdelena Gorska (2021) argues “who can breathe and who is in constant danger of losing their breath is clearly structured along the socially and environmentally toxic lines of racism” (113). The impact of the Grenfell Tower fire was recorded through the effects of the resulting smoke on the bodies of those who were in the building. With a similar correlation to the inability to breathe, one article argues ‘smoke plays an important, tragic role …. It was the inhalation of smoke that killed almost all of the victims of the blaze’ (Apps, 2023, line 6).Thus, it can be demonstrated how local governments, through neglect, have failed to consider the well-being and respiration of their vulnerable residents. 

What Insa Koch (2018) terms ‘the politics of welfare’ describes how neoliberal policies can be seen to have given social housing residents more autonomy and agency when in reality making them responsible for government failings. In this way, governments scapegoat tenants and only really admit blame once deaths have occurred. As the Report to prevent further death after Awaab Ishak’s death stated ‘Professionals placing too much emphasis on the cause of mould being due to "family lifestyle".... homes need to be habitable for modern living’ (Kearsley, 2022:2). Furthermore, an article published in 2023 suggested that the housing estate that he died on is still riddled with mould (Baynes 2023). This form of state neglect echoes in Catherine Fennel’s ethnography of Chicago’s housing projects (2015). Fennel demonstrates how state neglect and sensorial politics are often foregrounded by the blame of social housing tenants. Decay proves the dysfunction of infrastructure in their homes and housing projects, as it becomes enmeshed in their everyday lives and bodies. In Chicago's social housing estates, faulty objects within these homes seem to take on a life of their own, embodying the pervasive challenges of neglect and disrepair (71-99). However, this is often used as a way for local authorities to demolish housing and displace tenants through periods of unsettlement as seen in Fennel’s ethnography. 

The impact of the Grenfell tragedy on the bodies of its victims, though difficult to measure definitively, manifests in both visible and invisible ways. However, the impact on the victims has largely been overshadowed by the burning structure itself. This is supported by the argument of Yasmin Ibrahim (2023), who refers to Grenfell as ‘optical machinery’ it acts ‘as a sonic and visual structure constituted through death and trauma, it is a statement of wounded humanity’ (268). To this end, Grenfell stands as a visual representation of the lives lost as well as the outcome of government negligence. In many ways, the remaining structure of the building has consumed the identities of those who not only existed but lived within the tower. 

The debate over the building's status as a memorial (Foellmer, 2018) illustrates how the building overshadows the lives of those who perished in the fire. It acts as a symbol of violence enacted upon those considered not important enough to warrant high health and safety policy, by governments. It is important to draw attention to what this kind of violence does to the body. Laurie and Shaw (2018)  argue that violence is a condition that ‘truncates life’ (8-16). Furthermore, the survivors of Grenfell and the remaining families continue to be affected through trauma. Rachel Pain (2019) looks at the way in which ‘chronic urban trauma’ can manifest through the slow violence that occurs within cities due to austerity. This is embedded through the long-term effects of social housing inequality, and fosters distrust between communities and governments. 

I argue that through the combination of infrastructure and bodies, as exemplified in Grenfell and Awaab Ishak, victims are rendered less than human by the state. As Lessutis and Kaika (2024) argue ‘bodies are not themselves ontologically infrastructure ..they become violently infrastructured’ (9). The individual bodies of citizens and the victims of necropolitics become witnesses, site, and evidence of infrastructural violence. Affect theory can be used to convey how those who have died in social housing were no longer seen as human bodies by the state and so became entangled with faulty or decaying infrastructures in their homes, resulting in their death. Infrastructures and thus homes should be seen as strongly affective in how they can permanently alter the body. 

Bringing darkness to light: digital resistance in the built environment

In this section of the essay, I would like to draw attention to how social housing tenants are actioning themselves against necropower and state negligence. Social media has proven itself to be a useful tool of resistance and empowerment by allowing their voices and narratives to be heard. Arguably this use of social media enables heightened visibility which is constituted by Hannah Arrendt as crucial in the public domain. Arendt argues that the binaries of visibility and invisibility are important in defining the relationship between spectator and actor. Arendt terms the spaces where visibility empowers people as ‘spaces of appearance’ (Arendt cited in Marquez, 2012). Although this is not the only way activism takes place, it favours visualisation. 

I argue that through the use of social media such as TikTok people are allowed to grasp the autonomy to create their affective bodies. If slow and infrastructural violence is characterised by the way it is hidden and obscured, then the use of social media exemplifies how this is being brought to light. It is a case of shifting the gaze to rethink ‘Who is seeing and who is unseen’ (Paint and Cahil, 2021: 6). Paint and Cahil (2021) argue as a critique of slow violence which suggests that people are victimised and that people do perform acts of resistance. I argue that in doing so they negate the stereotypes that are placed on social housing tenants and instead foster empathy. Thus, social media has provided a way for the everyday practices of people to participate in globalised worlds where they can expose their ‘vulnerabilities’ (Knudsen and Stage, 2015). I suggest that those who use media as a platform from which to expand their social housing activism draw on affective economies (Ahmed 2004). Ahmed categorises these as the power of emotions to ‘align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments’ (119). In what seems unjust, it shows how social tenants must evoke emotion to be seen as human. 

In recent years the rise of social media can be documented through how it has platformed political events and social activism globally. Tiktok in particular has become a way for people to expose negligence. Knusden and Stage (2014) argue affect offers individuals the opportunity to bypass institutional hierarchies by evoking new social connections through media-aesthetic appeals to the sympathy or indignation of other bodies’ (1)‘. Kwajo Teneboa under the handle @Kwajohousing is using his platform to document the poor conditions of social housing in London. His TikTok videos often show the insides of mouldy properties and the inadequate living conditions of social housing tenants. Teneboa along with other social housing activists are demonstrating the lack of change that has taken place since Grenfell and the violence that is continually perpetuated against social housing tenants. 

Conclusion 

This essay has suggested how social housing declines and deaths are the result of necropolitics, through austerity and policy which is directed at specific demographics. It is through the valuations of specific bodies that violence occurs through the infrastructures of social housing. Not only do social housing residents suffer from severe forms of neglect from local governments entrusted with their care, but they are not allowed to belong, bodily or otherwise. The deaths in social housing have demonstrated that bodies of social housing tenants have become infrastructured. Furthermore, it is possible to see how the deaths were avoidable. Despite changes in policy following these deaths, it is through community activism that real change is taking place. As a result care and activism are sought out as ways of resisting necropolitics. 

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