‘Depotentiation’, as I employ the term, indicates the diminishment of imminent capacities, affects and potentialities. I propose this formulation to both complement and critique Harvey’s dominant notion of accumulation by dispossession as the commodification of the urban commons and to contribute to conceptual developments on the stratified and affective dimensions of eviction.

Recent debates in urban geography and anthropology have urged a rethinking of ‘marginal’ groups, viewing them not only as intimately connected to the state and its power, but also as offering a lens into alternate modes of dwelling, endurance and political change. We reflect upon the conceptual possibilities of such forms of endurance by examining how those residing in urban margins utilise, enable and inhabit connections to centres of power when faced with dispossession.

In this essay, I discuss the thresholds that constitute the liminality of the vitality of the urban poor in Metro Manila, as well as the significance of that vitality for another understanding of our global, urban mode of life.

This article draws on an ethnographic approach to concrete institutional practices and machine learning algorithms to analyse emergent proactive state geographies in London’s suburbs, assessing predictive modelling in housing enforcement in respect of the government of migrant housing precarity in the interstices of rentier and racial capitalism.

We argue that the urban institutional landscape constantly generates new promises as way of anticipation, which in turn allows residents to write themselves into select urban operations. This article engages two central districts in Rio de Janeiro and Jakarta to explore how residents “stand by” the promise, not of passive waiting, but as maneuvers of either staying tuned to or as way of tactical detachment from the multiple trajectories which have been conjured up in the here and now.