The Simple Bare Necessities: Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate

Abstract

This article tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelian oikos, has long fuelled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practise 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, 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 labour, sharing, welfare, debt, conserving material resources through remaking and repair and, crucially, the fundamental need of decency expressed through kin care. Through a historicised ethnography of a London social housing estate and its residents, this paper excavates what happens as these different forms and scales of household thrift co-exist, change over time and clash. Ultimately, neoliberal policy centred on an inimical idiom of thrift delegitimizes and disentitles low-income urban households of their capabilities to enact livelihood practices of sustainability and projects of dignity across generations.