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This paper builds upon Colin McFarlane's 2011 call inCityfor an ‘assemblage urbanism’ to supplement critical urbanism. It does so by mapping the spatio-political contours of London's 21st-century housing crisis through the geophilosophical framework of Deleuze and Guattari'sA Thousand Plateaus([1980] 2013, London: Bloomsbury] and Hardt and Negri's analysis of the metropolis inCommonwealth(2009, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). The paper examines the Focus E15 housing campaign based around a group of young mothers in the East London borough of Newham. In 2013, the mothers were living in the Focus E15 foyer supported housing unit for young people in Newham, but they were subsequently threatened with eviction as a result of welfare cuts. After successfully contesting the mothers’ own prospective expulsion from the city, the campaign shifted to the broader struggle for ‘social housing not social cleansing’. The paper draws upon participant observation at campaign events and interviews with key members. The Focus E15 campaign has engaged in a series of actions which form a distinctive way of undertaking housing politics in London, a politics that can be understood using a Deleuzoguattarian framework. Several campaign actions, including temporary occupations, are analysed. It is argued that these actions have created ‘smooth space’ in a manner which is to an extent distinctive from many other London housing campaigns which are rooted in a more sedentary defensive approach based around the protection of existing homes and communities—‘our place’. It is such spatio-political creativity—operating as a ‘nomadic war machine'—which has given rise to the high-profile reputation of the Focus E15 campaigners as inspirational young women who do not ‘know their place’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the spatial imprint and social impacts of the emerging geographies of concentrated overseas investment into London’s high-end real estate market, particularly the boroughs of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea. Framed by literatures on the 1% and the super-rich, and based on a mixed methodological approach of qualitative interviews with intermediaries and a quantitative mapping of overseas investors using 2011 census data, the results speak to the pervasive nature of “safe-haven” seeking in London real estate and its attendant transnational provenance set within a laissez-faire regulatory framework. In so doing, it makes an important contribution to the geographies of the super-rich, the class geographies of London, and the broader sense that overseas investors are producing what we call “pied-à-terre” urbanism which builds on a conventional gentrification framework (exclusionary displacement and a more affluent incoming group) but also exceeds it in several ways, leading to an increasingly socially attenuated landscape. This exceeding relates to: a different kind of rent gap, in that it is not speculative but safe-haven seeking, a guaranteed return on investment, and occurs without previous disinvestment; the agents are not traditional gentrifiers; the transnational nature of the process, with no attachment to particular places like in the traditional gentrification model; and a process focused on super-prime areas and completely independent of the existing gentrification process in London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]