Legal and cultural geographies of displacement: home unmaking through material belongings

Abstract

This article examines the role that material belongings play in displacement processes. Following the evacuation of the housing complex Hannibal II in Dortmund (Germany), the displacement of its 753 tenants, and the conflicts that ensued over the belongings they were forced to leave behind, we ask how the governance of material belongings shapes processes and experiences of displacement. Through an approach that brings in dialogue the cultural and legal significance of material belongings, we focus on the practices governing relationships between subjects, things, and place in displacement processes. Drawing on interviews with tenants, the legal framework governing property and possessions, and the proceedings around the tenants’ claims regarding their belongings, the findings disentangle a dual function of material belongings in displacement processes: First, they consider how belongings and their legal governance complicate the temporalities of displacement; second, they examine how the negotiation of the cultural significance of things has an impact on tenants’ subjectivities. The paper concludes that in displacement processes, tenants’ precarious claims to ownership over their stuff are, at the same time, voicing claims to social and spatial belonging that oppose broader domestic injustices.