Institutional abandonment as a precondition for social housing financialization: the production of ‘bare life’ in Dublin’s Oliver Bond House

This article examines how financialisation, institutional abandonment, and temporality operate as interlocking technologies of governance in Dublin’s Oliver Bond House. Using ethnographic and participatory research methods, the study demonstrates that the estate’s deterioration is not a failure of public policy but a strategic precondition for market-led redevelopment. Concepts such as “eviction time” and “bare life” frame how residents are governed through delay, infrastructural decay, and symbolic consultation, producing chronic precarity and deferred displacement. Comparative analysis of regeneration schemes across Dublin—Fatima Mansions, Dolphin House, O’Devaney Gardens, and St. Michael’s Estate—reveals a consistent logic of selective disinvestment and de-tenanting that renders social housing ripe for speculative reinvestment. Yet Oliver Bond is also a site of collective struggle. Through care networks, community surveys, and grassroots organising—often led by women—tenants challenge their marginalisation and assert housing as a public good. This case challenges narratives of financial inevitability, showing how it is constructed through specific governance practices and resisted on the ground. The article contributes to critical debates on urban governance, showing how the slow violence of abandonment coexists with enduring forms of agency and collective resilience.