Housing and community : geographies of precarity in rural Scotland

This thesis looks at the issue of housing precarity in rural Scotland. Through longitudinal case studies in three communities – Assynt (Northwest Sutherland), Kinloch Rannoch (Highland Perthshire) and South Harris (Outer Hebrides) – it considers the individual and collective impacts of the housing crisis. It answers three distinct but overlapping research questions: 1. How is rural housing precarity experienced? 2. How does rural housing precarity relate to community sustainability? and 3. How is rural housing precarity resisted? The first considers the household-level experience of insecure housing in the case study communities, the second looks at the connections between the rural housing problem and wider processes of austerity and rural depletion; finally, the third assesses means by which housing precarity is resisted, giving a critical assessment of present structures of housing provision. In doing so it develops and applies a specifically rural conceptualisation of housing precarity to consider both the underlying causes of failures in rural housing provision, and the individual and collective impacts of these failures. It argues that the housing system is an active agent in the precaritisation of place, and that, by extension, the rural is a key site in wider struggles for housing security and justice.