Displacement and Everyday Resistance: Seeking Spatial Justice in Urban Renewal Processes

Abstract

This study focuses on four housing displacement cases in which residents were forced to move from their homes and neighbourhoods. The data contain interviews with 39 displaced residents. We ask how the residents sought spatial urban justice in resisting their displacement. In analysing the data, we apply the concept of "everyday resistance" complemented with an understanding of resistance as discursive counter‐speech to various injustices experienced in the displacement processes. The results demonstrate that even if resistance is not collective or publicly visible, this does not mean that it does not exist. We located four repertoires of resistance in the interviews: reflective, emotional, rejective, and face‐to‐face. Through them, the residents questioned the processes of displacement and their consequences, identified power relations related to their displacement in the urban renewal processes and reacted to them, and, by doing so, tried to seek spatial justice for themselves.