Rental rooms: spaces of migrant housing, overcrowding, and social reproduction in the rentier city

When analysing housing precarity and politics, urban theory tends to focus on a few typical scales—the urban region, the neighbourhood, the house. This paper argues that the room/rooms need to be foregrounded as a scale, site and unit for understanding migrant housing geographies, overcrowded practices of social reproduction and the politics of urban inhabitation. In considering the case of migrants renting from a private landlord or intermediary in London as a rentier city that structurally produces spatial scarcity for precarious residents, the rooms addressed include rooms converted into shared worker dormitories, small rooms rented to single migrants, and single bedrooms in larger shared houses and single-bedroom flats rented to families. The paper demonstrates how migrant rental rooms unsettle and reformat social reproduction and home-making across multiple scales—transnational, urban, house—and politicise access to decent, affordable living space in the rentier city.