Between normalisation, critique and contestation: Factors that impact why tenants in threat of displacement do or do not resist landlords plans

Drawing on five years of ethnographic research with tenants facing mass cancellations due to renovation or demolition in Basel, Switzerland, this paper analyses the relation between landlords' plans and tenants threatened with displacement. Firstly, it shows how cancellations expose all tenants to a highly competitive market and to powerful discourses that present displacement as architecturally, ecologically, or socially necessary. The paper argues that residents react differently depending on how equipped they are to mitigate market forces and discourses, highlighting a variety of intersecting factors. Critique or direct resistance is supported by the presence of a political tenant union, strong counternarratives, long-term tenancies that foster neighbourly contact, as well as disappointments with current landlords’ cancellation practices. Foregrounding the interplay of intersecting structural factors that influence the resources tenants have to resist displacement, the paper highlights the significance of tenants’ trajectories as tenants in understanding their varying responses to displacement.