The Simple Bare Necessities

Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate

Bibliographic Data

ID2109283
AuthorsCatherine Alexander (0000-0003-4091-0407, Durham University, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume64
Issue4
Pages934-965
Publication date2022-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueComparative Studies in Society and History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0010-4175 • E-ISSN: 1475-2999
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0010417522000159
OpenAlexW4224323672
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited68

This article tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelianoikos, has long fueled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practice quite different forms of thrift. Since the 1970s this trope has migrated across scales, proving a potent metaphor for national economic policy and planetary care alike, and morally and economically justifying both neoliberal welfare retraction compounded by austerity policies and national responses to excessive resource extraction and waste production. Both austerity and formal recycling schemes shift responsibility onto consumer citizens, regardless of capacity. Further, this model of thrift eclipses the thriftiness of low-income urban households, which emerges at the nexus of kin and waged labor, sharing, welfare, debt, conserving material resources through remaking and repair and, crucially, the fundamental need for decency expressed through kin care. Through a historicized ethnography of a London social housing estate and its residents, this paper excavates what happens as these different forms and scales of household thrift coexist, change over time, and clash. Ultimately, neoliberal policy centered on an inimical idiom of thrift delegitimizes and disentitles low-income urban households and undermines their ability to enact livelihood practices of sustainability and projects of dignity across generations

Austerity · Debt · Economics · Estate · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Political Economy and Marxism · Finance · Law

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access