Evento

Encampments are in the news as vestiges and effects of local and transnational “housing crises” across cities of the Global North. In these provisional survival structures installed into the interstices of urban public space, the most marginalized are forced out into the streets as housing options for vulnerable urbanites become increasingly limited. Many marginalized and unhoused women, many of whom use street drugs, are unauthorized migrants and/or urban Indigenous people are invisibilized and banished from cities, unable to find durable housing and in many cases are even unable to subsist in State shelter systems. In encampments, they are also constantly chased by authorities and removed from public space and left with nowhere to live. In turn, State responses to encampments - namely procedures of “démantèlement” or Street Sweeps - have evolved as processes of displacement and banishment that enact specific forms of violence against all vulnerable inhabitants of encampments, but especially women. Findings from the authors’ respective research and practice-based work in the field indicate that women inhabit encampments for a host of gender-specific reasons - a recent rapid percentage of non-binary or trans or female-presenting service users have experienced gender-based violence both in the shelter system and during Street Sweeps, though they also live with the constant threat of violence while residing in encampments (Atira, 2023). This presentation, co-authored by a Geographer studying encampments in Vancouver and Paris and a humanitarian consultant who has recently completed a project on gender-based violence and barriers to shelter for women drug users in transnational contexts, argues that research on encampments, démantèlement, shelter access and the conceptualization and provision of durable housing option for marginalized women (including and especially women who use drugs) requires an explicitly feminist approach, in order to discern and highlight the challenges and hazards for women living in encampments and their capacities for accessing shelters that lead to durable housing solutions, if any,

Debates around public and social housing have increasingly become conflated with claims around who deserves what and why. In the context of growing scarcity, it no longer suffices to appeal to the ‘right to housing’ for all – instead, it has become commonplace to make claims to housing contingent upon such factors as income, employment, or citizenship status. In 2021, the government of Flanders, the northern Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, announced a fundamental restructuring of its social housing policy. A key feature of the reforms, which went into effect earlier this year, is a renewed set of allocation criteria. For prospective social tenants, the Dutch language requirement has been increased, and in addition, people with ‘local ties’ to a neighborhood – evidenced by having lived there for five consecutive years – are given priority on waiting lists. New rules also apply to current social tenants: any non-studying adult member of a family living in social housing is required to register as a job seeker and actively look for work; those who fail to do so can expect a hefty fine. The latter poses a particular challenge for female-headed households where single mothers have to balance child care with meeting the new tenancy requirements. Critics of the new policy, however, are rebuffed: according to the Flemish minister of housing, Matthias Diependaele, the purpose of the tightening of rules and new obligations is to “contribute to the emancipation of the social tenant."

In this paper, I turn a critical lens on two aspects of the new Flemish social housing policy: the ideological underpinnings of its renewed set of allocation criteria, as well as the impact that the policy changes have on households headed by migrant women. Based on a critical discourse analysis, I first discuss how the new allocation criteria reframe migrant undeservingness – the perception that people with a migration background are less deserving of access to social services than others – through the construction of a category of ‘the deserving local’. Tracing the romanticized idea of ‘the local’ as distinct from and yet intimately connected to notions of citizenship and belonging, I argue that the legitimization of migrant exclusion is solidified by a moral appeal to a ‘more deserving’ class. Next, I investigate the impact of the new regulations on female-headed households, specifically those with a migration background. Based on ethnographic research with two women’s groups in a social housing cooperative for migrants, I discuss the incommensurability of a discourse of emancipation with the lived realities of migrant women in the face of racialized and gendered discrimination. Finally, I reflect on the role of informal support networks, arguing these hold great solidary potential but should not divert attention from the structural lack of solutions to crises in neoliberal housing markets.

In sum, this paper attends to the racialized and gendered dimensions of social housing policies in the context of scarcity, demonstrating how (un)deservingness acts as a moral assessment of who should have access to social housing.

Keywords: deservingness; social housing; welfare conditionality; migrant women

The gender and sexuality dimensions regarding access to housing have been debated in feminist critiques of the meaning of home. Nevertheless, in-depth studies into the various housing trajectories, difficulties and experiences of LGBTQ+ domesticities have been limited, especially in Southern European contexts. The presentation will analyse housing vulnerability and dispossession in Greece through a focus on LGBTQ+ gender identity and sexuality. Since families often reject non-heteronormative members, LGBTQ+ subjectivities are forced into housing dispossession, displacement, and precarious living conditions. Due to lack of institutional rights or support infrastructure and the existing discrimination in regard to access to housing, LGBTQ+ people turn to coping strategies, which primarily involve support through informal, mutual aid networks.
Building on a qualitative research in Athens that included 22 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with LGBTQ+ people and solidarity networks, this presentation aims to contribute in ongoing debates regarding gendered dimensions of housing precarity in three ways: First, in empirical terms, by bringing forward the often invisible, in current debates, housing narratives and trajectories of LGBTQ+ people from the under-studied Greek context. Second, in analytical terms, we distinguish the different dimensions of forced translocations, housing dispossession, and displacement based on intersecting labor precarity, loss of income, barriers in accessing education and long-standing discrimination based on gender and/or sexual identity. All these eventually conduce to housing vulnerability, precarity and discrimination in multiple areas of social life and reproduction, as well as specific coping strategies that involve informal mutual aid and solidarity networks. Finally, in conceptual terms, our goal is to re-address housing vulnerability and precarity through a focus on LGBTQ+ agency as a generator of narratives that problematize the role of traditional family networks and state institutions in regard to access to housing.

Tanto en la planificación del territorio como en la planificación habitacional se ha omitido el protagonismo de las mujeres en la gestión del hábitat urbano (Soto, 2018). Las mujeres son doblemente excluidas, por un lado, como ciudadanas y por otro, a la hora de planificar; de tal forma la planificación y el diseño urbano tienen un carácter eminentemente sexista (Ortiz, 2007). En efecto, Alejandra Massolo (2004) ha documentado el papel protagónico de las mujeres dentro de los movimientos urbano-populares en las luchas por: el acceso a la vivienda, a servicios básicos, autoconstrucción de la vivienda y su entorno. Pese a que esta participación ha sido sistemática, no necesariamente se ha reflejado en la participación de las mujeres en las decisiones sobre el diseño de la ciudad, las unidades de vivienda o la planificación urbana. Un efecto principal de esta situación es que las respuestas institucionales se entienden aisladas sin considerar el continuo casa-calle-barrio-ciudad, bajo una concepción estática de vivienda. Y, con ello, mucho menor interés y énfasis se ha puesto en entender la extensión, la complementariedad de estas residencias con otros espacios de la ciudad (Imilan, Jirón, Iturra, 2005).

En esta línea de argumentación, podemos afirmar que existe un desencuentro entre los saberes/conocimientos técnicos (infraestructuras, servicios urbanos, equipamientos, viviendas, y mejoramientos urbanos entre otros) y los saberes/conocimientos cotidianos de los y las habitantes de las viviendas y colonias. En especial cuando observamos que la producción social de la vivienda ha dejado fuera la reproducción social y el trabajo de cuidados. En esta perspectiva, hay acuerdo en que la vivienda y el entorno es un lugar central para los cuidados, y la sostenibilidad de la vida, no obstante, no se considera en qué grado la vivienda (ya sea como casas individuales o como el sistema de vivienda amplio) se articula con el cuidado, facilitando o dificultando la capacidad de los hogares para cuidar. Esto evidencia que los arreglos para atender a las personas y al entorno no alcanzan de acuerdo con la división sexual entre lo público-privado de los territorios, lo que nos obliga a replantear las bases sobre las que se organiza la sostenibilidad en un sentido más amplio.

En este contexto esta presentación no sólo busca documentar el desajuste entre las necesidades de vivienda de las mujeres y el producto material que puede ser la vivienda, el hábitat y las políticas que operan en diferentes escalas, sino que se pregunta por la producción de conocimientos y saberes locales y, su papel en la configuración de potenciales respuestas institucionales. En este sentido y desde una perspectiva feminista se retoma la idea del conocimiento situado que desarrollan cotidianamente las mujeres en el proceso de habitar la vivienda en la zona oriente de la Ciudad de México, específicamente en la alcaldía de Iztapalapa.


Bibliografía
Imilan, Walter, Jirón, Paola, & Iturra, Luis (2018). Más allá del barrio: Habitar Santiago en la movilidad cotidiana. Antropologías Del Sur, 2(3), 87-103. https://doi.org/10.25074/rantros.v2i3.833
Massolo, Alejandra (Comp.) (2004) Una mirada de género a la ciudad de México, UAM-A, RNIU: México.
Ortiz Guitart, Anna (2007) Hacia una ciudad no sexista. Algunas reflexiones a partir de la geografía humana feminista para la planeación del espacio urbano Territorios, núm. 16-17, enero-julio, 2007, pp. 11-28.
Soto, Paula (2018). “Hacia la construcción de unas geografías de género de la ciudad. Formas plurales de habitar y significar los espacios urbanos en Latinoamérica”. Perspectiva Geográfica, 23(2).