Navigating off-grid living: Dignity and resilience on urban waterways

What the paper says

This paper explores London’s continuous cruising community through Polanyi’s double movement theory, analysing how boat dwellers navigate between market commodification of waterways and collective practices of protection and re-embedding. Drawing on seven months of ethnographic research, participant observation, and reflexive thematic analysis, we explore how itinerant liveaboards negotiate semi-off-grid living as both a technical infrastructure withdrawal and a vernacular resistance to the housing market. Our paper reveals mobile precarity as a governance condition produced by strategic neglect of infrastructure, the removal of mooring spaces, rising license fees, and intensified enforcement. The commercialisation strategy through Water Safety Zones and “eco-mooring” schemes demonstrates how environmental discourse legitimises displacement. Yet community responses transcend simple coping through practices of mutual aid, cross-class solidarity, and collective resistance that we theorise as everyday decommodification. The paper makes three contributions: extending Polanyian analysis to mobile housing contexts; reframing off-grid living as mundane politics rather than spectacular lifestyle; and positioning dignity as an analytical bridge between precarity and value transformation. By disrupting the terra-centric/aquatic divide that structures urban theory, we reveal how spatial assumptions about land-as-property versus water-as-flow sustain both the metabolic rift and housing inequality. The paper demonstrates that inclusive urban futures require recognising waterways as legitimate dwelling spaces deserving of infrastructural rights, not mere leisure commodities subject to market pricing.