Resisting renovictions: tenants organizing against housing companies’ renewal practices in Sweden

While governing practices, as articulated in policies and other documents intended to shape tenants’ behavior, have been given considerable attention research, less has the self-regulation of tenants practice or how these governance practices are challenged resisted from below. The ambition our work is study deployed by housing companies two Swedish cities achieve compliance with extensive renewal plans, conceptualize this means exerting power through which governed, silenced surveilled, their collective interests divided. Building on several years ethnographic among communities experiencing renovation homes and, particular, qualitative interviews focus-group tenants, analyzes exercised contested tenants. Our contribution twofold: First, we propose broadening notion repertoires contention alongside collectively organized include covert individual forms resistance. We understand mutually shaping, distinguish between eight resistance common facing renovictions (indirect evictions caused skyrocketing rents) Sweden: building local identities, mixing formal informal organization, delaying process, detournement, politics disengagement, demanding accountability visibility, reversing knowledge hierarchies, reversed shaming. Second, aim add still understudied field mobilizations context.