Evictability—A Relational Comparison: Fears, Manoeuvres and Regimes of Housing Insecurity in Rapidly Urbanising Cities

ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of ‘evictability’—the potential of eviction—as a lens for relational comparison and global dialogue. The discussion is grounded in the fears and manoeuvres of marginalised urban dwellers, who live in ‘informal’ and ‘underserved’ spaces of rapidly urbanising cities, where substantive citizenship is compromised by systemic housing insecurity. It is important to focus on the threat of eviction rather than the act itself to draw attention to how fear ramifies through space and time, working as a mechanism of power that infuses insecure residents' everyday lives beyond simply those evicted, with far‐reaching material and political consequences. ‘Evictability’ has advantages over ‘displaceability’, we argue, because fears of coerced loss of home are not always centrally about a ruptured relationship with place or the desire not to move. The article is grounded in eight years of research in three medium‐sized rapidly urbanising capital cities in countries with histories of conflict and contrasting regimes of urban governance—Colombo (Sri Lanka), Harare (Zimbabwe) and Hargeisa (Somaliland). Each city regime combines the production of systemic housing insecurity with opportunities for some through resettlement or support for incremental building and in situ regularisation. A relational comparison of evictability offers a lens focussed on understanding residents' fears and manoeuvres vis‐à‐vis housing that recognises the political potency of this lived threat. It can take forward scholarship on global evictions, because it encourages discussion of agency, does not presume all residents share deep connections to place or treat all forms of mobility as coerced and undesirable.