„From bad to worse” – Patterns of housing mobility in a marginalised space

Abstract

This paper examines the nexus between marginalisation and (im)mobility in a specific building complex, that four marginalised groups frequent: homeless people who reside at the homeless shelter, formerly homeless people who rely on the shelter’s social services, formal tenants who belong to the lowest segment of the local social housing sector, and ‘drop-outs’ of the local social housing program who became informal residents after being evicted. In the analysis I scrutinize the patterns of housing mobility trajectories of these marginalised groups drawing on the concept of micromobility developed by Porcelli and her co-authors. Through this concept, I attempt to grasp different kinds of spatial mobilities across various forms of housing, institutions and specific marginalised places. Micromobility differs in some ways from the notion of housing mobility: it refers to temporary movements in housing trajectories, which can change relatively quickly; these spatial movements are ’micro’ in scale, and they may remain unregistered. These micromobilities are not necessarily formed by individual and autonomous relocations between houses or flats; they are often forced movements between different institutions. Micromobility triesto show that individuals circulate and are made to circulate around different marginalised places,forms of housing and institutions.

The building complex, which in this paper I have called “Bay Grove”, provided cheap and low level housing for the rural poor who came here in the last decades of socialism (similarly toother marginalised urban places as Vigvári revealed). Bay Grove worked as a “spatial node” in that meaning which is developed by Hannam, Sheller and Urry: it had the (hidden) function of organising people’s movements around different marginalised places. This function was cemented when the homeless shelter was relocated here, the presence of which only increased Bay Grove’s stigmatisation. Today Bay Grove serves as a place to hide away and govern marginalised groups. The presence and the protocols of Bay Grove’s institutions (the homeless shelter and the remains of the big social housing unit) strongly shape different marginalised groups’ housing mobility trajectories and their strategic use of institutions.

The empirical results show that mobility and immobility are mutually connected in micromobilities and they are constituted by both voluntary and involuntary movements, that is, by the dynamics of structure and agency as Carling and Schewel and other scholars pointed out earlier. In Bay Grove most of the micromobilities are generated by institutions; they are often enforced movements, in which individual agency does not seem to play a significant role. However, each marginalised group displays specific patterns of micromobilities occasionally combined with a strategic relationship towards institutions. Different patterns of micromobilities show that individual rooms for manoeuvring might be enlarged. However, micromobilities in Bay Grove do not seem to be effective tools for decreasing social inequalities. Although they can contribute to survival in the short run, and may enlarge one’s room for manoeuvring in the medium term, micromobilites across different marginalised places, forms of housing and institutions rarely result in permanent changes in one’s social and spatial position, that is, they rarely lead to(housing)mobility in its classical sense.