Waiting, planning, and tricking the future

Abstract This article explores the aftermath of the criminalization of residential squatting in England and Wales in 2012. It draws on ethnography among squatters in South East London, analyzing their strategies for resisting the uncertainty of eviction, and engages critically with the concepts of capitalist time and temporal agency. As the pressure of time-specific laws protecting the interests of the owners of empty properties creates an environment of ever-present uncertainty and insecurity, the squatters perform specific future-oriented activities aiming to resist and overcome the external capitalist timeframes imposed on them. By highlighting certain practices such as decoration, furniture building, information gathering, and waiting, this article explores the future-oriented timescapes of squatting and the manipulation of linear temporal processes embedded in the logics of capitalism.