A Political Economy of Friendship? Intimacy and Capital in Hackney’s Rented Sector Seminar

The inflation of assetised housing in London, coupled with successive erosions to social and private renters’ rights, has rendered affordable shelter scarce. Owing to the widespread requirement to pool financial resources through living with multiple people, the resulting housing landscape is often characterised by constellations of quasi-voluntary cohabitation and care. As such, these spaces are affectively structured, increasingly, around compromised choice, dashed futures and obstruction to idealised relational forms.

In this talk, I explore the ways that millennial reconfigure their relational and reproductive ambitions amidst prolonged housing insecurity in Hackney’s rented sector. Drawing on social reproduction theory that centres the replenishment of differentiated value, I argue that the economic instrumentalization of friendship and intimacy is of core importance to understanding rentier capitalism more broadly.

Speaker Information

Dr Faith Taylor - Lecturer in Human Geography, Royal Holloway University of London