Lauren Wagner has published a book chapter titled ’Guarding presence: Absent owners and the labour of managing vacancy’ in The New Urban Ruins: Vacancy, Urban Politics and International Experiments in the Post-Crisis City, edited by Cian O’Callaghan and Cesare Di Feliciantonio.
The book centres on urban vacancy as a core feature of urbanisation, using international case studies from the Global North and Global South to explore how vacant urban spaces are sites of political contestation, lived use, and potential for re-purposing.
This chapter on Guarding Presence is part of Lauren Wagner’s project Care Matters which explores how the need for care labour manifests as fundamental to making housing liveable. It presents fieldwork from Tangier, Morocco on absences of occupants in housing and the different forms of presence that take their place.
