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Evictions: Reconceptualizing Housing Insecurity from the Global South

Urban sociologists have recently discovered the problem of residential evictions. Although displacement has been a major theme in sociological studies of gentrification, homelessness, and public housing transformation, the forced removal of tenants from rental housing been the subject of surprisingly little sociological research (Desmond 2012a; Hartman and Robinson 2003). With the new visibility that Matthew Desmond has brought to the topic with his award–winning ethnography Evicted and the rigorously researched articles he and his colleagues have produced, evictions have begun to attract more scholarly attention (Herring 2014; Desmond and Shollenberger 2015; Purser 2016; Desmond, Gershenson, and Kiviat 2015; Brady 2017; Sullivan 2018; Garboden and Rosen 2019; Brady 2019). Yet while the topic has been largely overlooked by American urban sociologists, interdisciplinary scholars studying cities in the Global South have been researching the problem of forced removals for decades, particularly in informal, auto–constructed, or “slum” settlements prevalent in southern cities. As American urban sociologists turn their attention to evictions, it is important that they not overlook the empirically grounded, theoretically robust insights drawn from urban research in the Global South. In this paper, I set up a conversation between the usually separate literatures on rental evictions in U.S. cities and urban “slum” evictions in the Global South. Given the geographical and disciplinary breadth of research on southern cities, I limit my review to studies of evictions in India and South Africa. As two former British colonies with distinct developmental trajectories but comparable levels of housing insecurity, these cases underscore both the common themes and contextual specificity found in this literature.1 When we reconceptualize evictions from the South, I argue that two aspects of housing insecurity come into clearer focus: First, despite the emphasis on individuals and families in the recent U.S. literature, evictions are also collective events that impact whole neighborhoods and communities. This insight is important for understanding not only the experience of evictions and their effects on cities, but also the possibilities for collective action. Secondly, when we re–center the study of evictions southward, it becomes clearer that evictions are patently political acts, and cannot be explained solely with a focus on markets and housing affordability. While housing insecurity in the United States is also shaped by historically entrenched political conflicts, discriminatory logics, and local power brokering, these political dimensions may be easier to discern in contexts where governments, rather than private landlords, typically do the evicting. 100069 CTYXXX10.1177/15356841211000695City & CommunityWeinstein research-article2020