Evento

Keywords : affordable housing, community land trust, property, urban policy. Abstract: Access to housing is a central challenge for contemporary policies. Community land trust (CLT) encounters a particular interest today in US, Latin America, and in Europe as a way to ensure access to affordable housing (Cabannes, 2013). CLT has been developed thanks to a long story of activism that began in the United States in the 1960s in the flow of both the civil rights movement and the struggles against Robert Moses regeneration plan of New York downtown. Considered crucial by many international experts (Angotti, 2007; Chatterton, 2013; Rolnik, 2013; Madden e Marcuse, 2016) to contrast pervasive forms of speculation and financialized gentrification (Lees et al., 2008; Aalbers, 2016), CLT is based on three founding principles: the disjunction of land ownership from the enjoyment of housing units; the rent limitations; the local, tripartite governance involving residents, the neighbor community and public stakeholders. In France, a similar institution, the Organisme de Foncier Solidaire (OFS), was recently included in the urban planning code in 2014, and in major metropolitan areas, urban policies have largely supported its development for promoting medium-income housing avoiding the ongoing middle-class suburbanization.
The paper focuses on a crossed analysis of the US and the French model approaching these institutions through the critical legal geography lens (Blomley, 1994, Blomley et al. 2001). I propose a decolonial and feminist perspective referring to the commons as an analytical framework to point out how these emerging practices produce– not public nor private - housing policies aiming to ensure the right to the city for medium and low-income people and minorities.
We argue both the French and the north American solutions represent innovative policies characterized by a disarticulation of property reversing exclusivity and promote social access (Angotti, 2007; Le Rouzic, 2019; Chardeaux, 2020). Nevertheless, recent analyses show a more fuzzy picture in the CLT American sector, with a growing number of CLT highly hetero-directed, others which are mainly managed in partnership between the public and the private social sector, and others oriented towards commodification albeit within such a protected market (Durose et al., 2021; DeFillipis et al. 2018). We can thus state how the atypical nature of CLT has promoted flexible and variegated solutions, useful in limiting rent, but with variable and often ambivalent impacts and effectiveness. Finally, despite recurrent references to the militant genealogy of the CLT, the French OFS, does not aim to promote local community participation mainly seeking the public contrast of real estate speculation and the control of public funds more than the re-politicization of affordable housing as an urban commons (Festa, 2015; Balmer and Bernet, 2015; Huron, 2018;).
Despite such critical adaptations cautionary to be scrutinized, we focus on anti-racist, feminist, and urban movements' ability to point out, on one side, a deep critical revision on property and its exclusionary effects in the city and, on the other, to propose alternative ways to govern dwellings in order to locally contrast gentrification guaranteeing the right to stay put in the neoliberal city. Nowadays, these original bottom-up policies, thanks to the transnational network of policy mobility, show a global influence proving how alternative housing institutions can play today a larger and systemic role.

Aalbers, M. 2016. The Financialisation of Housing: A Political Economy Approach. London, Routledge.
Angotti, T. 2007. «Community land trusts and low-income multi-family rental housing (working paper): The case of Cooper Square, New York City», 2007 http:// www.lincolninst.edu/ pubs/ 1 272_Community- Land-Trusts-and-Low-Income-Multifamily-Rental- Housing.
Balmer I. and Bernet T.. 2015. “Housing as a Common Resource? Decommodification and Self-Organization in Housing - Examples from Germany and Switzerland”. Urban Commons. Moving Beyond State and Market edited by Mary Dellenbaugh, Markus Kip, Majken Bienick, Agnes Katharina Müller, Martin Schwegmann, 178-195. Basel: Birkhäuser.
Blomley, N. 1994. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: The Guilford Press
Blomley, N., Delaney, D., & Ford, R. 2001. The Legal Geographies Reader: law, power, and space Oxford: Blackwell.
Cabannes, Y. 2013. Collective and Communal Forms of Tenure, UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, Background Paper.
Chatterton, P. 2013. «Towards an agenda for post‐carbon cities: Lessons from Lilac, the UK's first ecological, affordable cohousing community», International Journal for Urban and Regional Research, vol. 37, n° 5, pp. 1654-1674.
Chardeaux M.-A. 2020. « Repenser la propriété pour promouvoir la solidarité. À propos du bail réel solidaire », Délibérée, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 38-42.
DeFilippis, J., Brian S. and Williams O. 2018. «W(h)ither the community in community land trusts? », Journal of Urban Affairs, , 40, 6, pp. 755–769.
Durose, C., Richardson L., Rozenburg M., Ryan M. and Escobar O. 2021. “Community Control in the Housing Commons: A Conceptual Typology”, International Journal of the Commons 15, 1, pp. 291–304.
Festa D. 2015. La creatività del comune in Bernardi C., Brancaccio F., Festa D. e Mennini B. (a cura di), Fare spazio. Pratiche del comune e diritto alla città, Mimesis, Milano-Udine, pp. 81-97.
Huron, Amanda. 2018. Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C. University of Minnesota Press.
Lees Loretta, Tom Slater, Elvin Wyly and Winifred Curran. 2008. Gentrification, Routledge.
Le Rouzic, Vincent. 2019. Essais sur la post-propriété : les organismes de foncier solidaire face au défi du logement abordable, thèse de doctorat, Univ. Paris 1.
Madden, David and Marcuse, Peter. 2016. In Defense of Housing. The Politics of Crisis. London/New York, Verso.
Rolnik, R. 2013. « Late Neoliberalism: The Financialization of Homeownership and Housing Rights», International Journal of Urban and Regiona Research, vol. 37, p. 1058–106

Keywords: Self-build, Land Occupations, Intersectional Ecologies, Women, São Paulo, Democratization. Abstract: This paper analyzes housing struggles as sites in which new political identities emerge at the intersection of gender, race, class, and the environment. My entry points to these dynamics are the large-scale occupations of rural lands to access housing in São Paulo's northern periphery during the Brazilian democratization period. In the 1980s and 1990s, the embodied identities of working-class women (many Black and Brown) were crucial to securing access to land and self-build houses.
My analysis combines land occupations at the feet of the Serra da Cantareira Forest (Morro do Quiabo and Filhos da Terra), self-build practices (Jardim Apuanã), and infrastructure disputes (Jardim Felicidade). In São Paulo's northern periphery, housing struggles cannot be separated from mobilizations for land and infrastructure. On the one hand, land occupations and self-build practices pressured the city government to provide infrastructure for low-income people. On the other hand, self-built houses and infrastructure provisioning led the municipality to recognize land rights.
To develop my argument, I draw on recent scholarly approaches that consider the field of politics as an ecology. According to these approaches, political agency adapts constantly to changing conditions. As a result, contentious politics configure fields of interdependence and feedback loops that create opportunities, challenges, and conflicts. By considering the distributed and relational forms of contentious politics, this paper's contribution to understanding housing struggles is twofold:
First, it sheds light on the formation of specific embodied identities (e.g., the “women-warriors,” the militant women, the women self-builders) through land, housing, and infrastructure struggles. Following feminist attention to the body as a site of contestation and exercise of power, my focus is on the emergence of political agency at the intersection of bodies and ecologies. Women were differently positioned subjects involved in the contentious politics of the 1980s and 1990s, with distinct bodily experiences shaping their political identity. In São Paulo, they played with bourgeois imagination around poverty to threaten public officers and used their assigned societal gender roles in transformative ways to disrupt entrenched gender roles. Embodied practices and strategies on the fly were tools to subvert and resignify places associated with male institutional power.

Second, I demonstrate how nonhuman agents, such as hills, creeks, the forest, and soil, are crucial for constructing different political identities and shaping housing movement outcomes. The presence of the Serra had a significant impact on social movements’ camouflage techniques, guerrilla tactics, visibility, and invisibility that permeated their land encroachments and housing struggles. From hillsides to institutional halls, women's actions involved fires, rocks, bricks, water, and filth. I focus on how they enacted forms of oppression and resistance through specific material politics. By articulating the multi-scalar geographies of contentious politics—circulation, networks, nature, and bodies—I aim to facilitate an understanding of the materiality of occupied spaces, self-build housing, and everyday politics.
Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and visual methods, ultimately, this paper provides a rich analysis of the political activation of São Paulo's hills for housing access during the Brazilian democratization period. It emphasizes how intersectional identities and material and ecological formations shape and are shaped by specific housing struggles.

The Hausprojekte are radical collective living spaces with a political bent which have played a formative role in many areas of Berlin since the German reunification. Through ongoing experimentation with different ways of organising collective life, they seek to challenge traditional scripts of intimacies and domesticities while enabling alternative forms of orienting towards and organising communal life. A central aspect of their prefigurative attempts is the adoption of horizontal decision-making processes as the primary organising structure for collective life. The assembly where such decisions are made is called in German, the Plenum, which may include questions of reproductive tasks, finances and house management. It also structures queries as to involvement in political causes, discussions about the community, and its own goals, challenges and tensions. Adopting an assembly thus usually reflects prefigurative efforts of experimentation with horizontal, non-hierarchical decision-making aimed at self-management and the construction of more egalitarian ways of life.

Throughout this paper, I examine the Plenum as the main decision-making body in housing projects. Enquiring into the constitution and functioning of the Plenum, I identify and discuss its distinctive procedures, materialities and temporalities while addressing what constitutes a decision in this context. Unlike much of the literature on the assembly that tends to focus on the form of an instrumentalised process, I delve into its content, the mechanics of decision-making, and the assemblages of practices, ideas, affective tonalities and emotional labour that constitutes it. I argue that this is key to seriously considering the prefigurative potential of radical housing based on collective decision-making. Drawing on different ways of thinking about the assembly and the material collected during immersive ethnographic work conducted in a radical housing in Berlin in 2020 and 2022, I suggest that the assembly should be considered in terms of performativity and affect; as an embodied space of performativity that allows for specific ways of affecting others and being affected by them. Following this approach, the Plenum appears as a space that is best understood as a porous and shifting one, resulting from the interweaving of individual and collective histories, voices, tonalities and atmospheres in the intersection of unequal power geometries that shape the encounter and decision-making process.

Furthermore, based on my ethnographic participation in the Plenums at LaCasa and interviews with members of this and other projects, I identify and examine some of the limitations of the involvement in the assembly. I do so by considering the assembly as a sonic space, an approach that facilitates broader consideration for both the discursive and affective components of the deliberative process. I explore how language, communication qualities, participatory expectations, and atmospheric and affective tonalities may constitute obstacles to full involvement in the assembly. By paying attention to how obstacles partly reproduce the dynamics of exclusion and systemic inequality they seek to dismantle, I point out the contradictions and frictions present in the attempts to build horizontal and non-hierarchical spaces. Thereby, I suggest that attempts to address structural discrimination in radical housing initiatives are in constant dialogue with the capacities and limitations of the collective. This discussion, in turn, allows for consideration regarding listening practices as a critical element in constructing collective spaces for solidarity. Ultimately, I contend prefigurative attempts at housing projects should be understood as messy, multidirectional and often contradictory efforts of transformation.

Finally, I reflect on what the dynamics of the Plenum teach about broader notions of assembly politics. Here I pay particular attention to Judith Butler's work on the generative capacities of public assemblies (2015). Butler develops a framework with public spaces in mind. However, these spaces are in part derived from the kind of consensus-based decision-making mostly adopted in spaces of radical politics. In some ways, activists and participants of autonomous spaces have been thinking about the question of assembly and experimenting with it for much longer. With this in mind, I argue that the Plenum is a space of negotiation of multiplicities marked by the constant shifting of domestic discussions and others of a more obviously political nature. This demonstrates how it can enable specific experiences that foster particular attachments to the collective living project and housing. Moreover, I claim that through everyday practices, Hausprojekte contest the configuration of experience by challenging rights of participation in the production of commons; forms and skills of assembly; and the building of political spaces and infrastructures of dissent. In practice, however, this is a complex process where situated power dynamics of oppression and discrimination strain efforts to build solidarity and horizontal infrastructures in the immediacy of collective and individual feelings, moods, attunements and affective atmospheres.

This paper is situated in the debate around the prefigurative capacities of radical housing, shedding light on some of the challenges and contradictions in the construction of solidarity and horizontal spaces. Taking the assembly as a point of departure, it provides an account of what is at stake in the collective negotiation of multiplicity in radical housing initiatives. In turn, this functions as the basis for reflecting on how understanding the decision-making process at the housing level helps us reframe the question of assembly more broadly.

Key words: radical housing; assembly; prefiguration; affect; voice

The multiplicity of housing crises, their causes, and resistances have proliferated in academic and activist work over the past decade. However, the role and vision of real estate developers remains understudied, as the logics of developers are assumed to follow the logics of capital. Using Portland, Oregon USA as a study site, I argue that the localized real estate state is an assemblage of elites attempting to maintain the city in a state of “just crisis enough” (Stein 2019). The impetus for this research was a case study of a jail-turned-homeless shelter in Portland, redeveloped through a partnership between a developer, an anti-state state politician, and a nonprofit. But as I found through interviews with developers, archival digging, and ethnographic work throughout the city, this jail-turned-shelter and its push against a Housing First approach was just the beginning. There is a diversity of ways in which local real estate developers, who have long-standing ties and stakes in the city, affect approaches to managing the housing crisis. From the installation of informal hostile infrastructures to organizing as political dark money groups, real estate developers in Portland have made clear that their strategies for “ending homelessness” are not only carceral, but also work within informality and gray spaces (Roy 2011).

Drawing from legal geography, radical housing studies, and abolitionist geographies, I attempt to outline, first, the powers that make up the financial and political machine of the localized real estate state. As developers utilize their own tools to shift narratives of the housing crisis from a matter requiring care to one of carcerality, they utilize story-making as city-making. The vision of the city for developers, I argue, is one of a progressive dystopia (Shange 2019). As a “perpetually colonial place that reveals both the possibilities and limits of the late liberal imaginary,” Portland as a progressive dystopia is anchored in long histories of settler-colonialism, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy. In constructing the city as a dystopia that works for them, real estate developers utilize logics of carceral progressivism – meaning resources and ideas circulate, creating additional programs and bureaucracies that cite equity and justice, but never actually address nor dismantle a fundamentally unjust housing market. The maintenance of housing deprivation shifts it into a kind of crisis ordinariness, or an everyday-ness to the crisis that pulls more and more tenants and residents into a state of permanent displaceability (Berlant 2011, Roy 2020).

Knowing the vision of the localized real estate state and the extent to which they are able to govern housing provision (or lack thereof) is essential to being able to see the fissures and inconsistencies within their carceral progressivism. Though the provision of rental assistance and the proliferation of landlord-partnership programs is often celebrated as an increase in housing stability, these initiatives only serve to funnel public and nonprofit funding into private pockets. The way forward, then, is building an abolitionist approach to housing justice (Gilmore 2022). In order to push back on housing deprivation, it requires tackling the structures of housing crisis (otherwise known as the proliferation and dominance of real estate as a financialized commodity), rather than the outcomes of the crisis (also known as mass homelessness). I end with examples of liberatory projects in the city, from a rogue developer building housing through partnerships instead of public subsidies, and an encampment for the unhoused, run by the unhoused. Again, working with Shange’s conception of progressive dystopia, I attempt to identify possibilities for willful defiance in the real estate state, or the “agentic flows that creatively adapt to and subvert the terms of carceral progressivism, exposing its incoherencies and fissures” (Shange 2019, 15). The possibilities of willful defiance open up alternative pathways toward self-determined dwelling and inhabitance, unsettling the assumed dominance of the real estate state.

Keywords: housing, real estate, carcerality, abolition geographies


Works Cited

Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gilmore, R.W. (2022) Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation. Verso.

Roy, A. (2011) Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 35(2): 223-238.

Roy, A. 24 November 2020. Emergency Urbanism. Public Books.

Shange, S. (2019) Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anti-Blackness, & Schooling in San Francisco. Durham: Duke University Press.

Stein, S. (2019) Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. Verso.

Keywords: cooperative housing, affordable housing, private ownership, redevelopment, degrowth, caste.

The struggle to find viable, affordable degrowth housing alternatives in the global North has catalyzed a moment of reemergence and experimentation for housing cooperatives in that part of the world (Ferreri & Vidal, 2022). While housing cooperatives have only enjoyed a niche status in the western world, in India cooperative housing comprises a predominant share of the urban formal housing stock. In urban centers of the country, the cooperative form is colloquially associated with housing in apartment buildings. However, the predominance of housing cooperatives has not resulted in a sizeable stock of degrowth, affordable housing in Indian cities. On the contrary cities like Mumbai, which were the initiation point for housing cooperatives in the country and where they continue to proliferate, have the most unaffordable real estate markets in the country. This paper seeks to explore the reasons behind this paradox in the existence of cooperative housing in urban India and articulate the peculiar shape that the community-led, commons has taken in these cities.
Cooperative housing has been a part of the urban housing milieu in India since the start of the 20 th century (Rao, 2012). Since its introduction in the colonial Presidency Town of Bombay, cooperative housing has come to occupy a prominent position in the formal housing stock in the country. This is especially the case in the urban metropolitan region of Mumbai, where there an estimated half million cooperative housing societies. While this indicates the successful evolution of an unbroken history of cooperative housing societies adopted from the colonial presidency of Bombay (Ganapati, 2010), the contemporary housing cooperative displays significantly different attributes from the thinking which informed the introduction of housing cooperatives in India. In the early 1900s housing cooperatives presented a useful framework for caste-based groups looking to secure affordable housing for members of their community in a growing city. The community-led, commons-based attributes of the cooperative form enabled caste-groups to hijack the cooperative form to create housing stock for its members to the exclusion of others (Rao, 2012; Sharma, 2015; Singh et. al., 2019).
However, the desire to hold on to community-based forms of housing has had to confront the push for an individual-led, private property regime within the cooperative framework. Faced with the prospects of accumulating real estate value and making windfall profits, the framework of cooperative housing in India has been entirely transformed from the outside and within. This paper traces the history of changes to the political economy which led to the institutionalization of a private property-based ‘ownership’ model in the cooperative framework.
However, the individualization and financialization of the cooperative form has not dissolved its community-based directive to hold on to exclusionary spaces of housing. Relying on interviews from an instrumental case-study of a caste-based cooperative housing society in Mumbai, this paper details the ways in which members of the housing cooperative attempt to realize the full capital value of their units within the cooperative, while maintaining the homogenous, caste-based character of the cooperative.

References:
Fereri, M. & Vidal, L. 2022. Public- cooperative policy mechanisms for housing commons. International Journal of Housing Policy, 22(2), pp. 365-380.
Ganapati, S. 2010. Enabling Housing Cooperatives: Policy Lessons from Sweden, India and the United States. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 34(2), pp. 365-380.
Rao, N. 2012. House, but No Garden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sharma, S.G. Jun 2, 2015. Discrimination in housing: In Mumbai, a city of migrants, prejudice begins at home. Hindustan Times. Retrieved from https://www.hindustantimes.com/mumbai/discrimination-in-housing-in-mumbai-a-
city-of-migrants-prejudice-begins-at-home/story-OSFfYk2uKIlZcnanmdebvO.html
Singh, G., Vithayathil, T. & Pradhan, K.C. 2019. Recasting inequality: residential segregation by caste over time in urban India. Environment and Urbanization, 31(2), pp. 615-634.

Key Words: Autonomy, Intersectionality, Heterarchy, Squatting. Abstract: “Be autonomous!” This is an expression I often heard as both an ‘interpersonal directive’ and a ‘way of life’ during my time living and researching amidst a squatting collective at the autonomous social center Klinika in Prague, Czechia. But what does it actually mean to be autonomous at any one moment? And how does one ‘act autonomous(ly)’ within a daily life which requires cooperation with others in one’s community? But most importantly, what does it actually feel like to ‘be autonomous’ and live within an autonomous community?
My ethnographic work centers on these questions as they pertain to Leftist inspired political projects, such as Klinika’s; how ‘autonomy’ – as a core ‘governing’ principle – was practiced daily by individuals within the space; and how these practices led to unpredictable and spontaneous practices which created a specifically fluid and autonomous system of social interaction in the community. As a challenge to existing understandings of autonomy, rather than focus on broader more collectivized notions of ‘autonomy ‘from’, ‘against’, or ‘in relation to’ other actors – as many other studies have done – my work starts from the ground up with how individuals enact an “integrated” autonomy within Eastern philosophical parameters (Brindley), and what social dynamics and collective practices were created within a larger community when individuals act autonomously within anarchist principles. Within this logic, I interpret this system through a critical Daoist lens, and as an intersectional heterarchy. This reinterpretation of power dynamics – beyond the horizontal-hierarchical dichotomy – affords a more dynamic and fluid understanding of power relationships in which individuals can capitalize on their diverse skillsets and talents within the fluid intersectional nature of autonomy; and which affords the opportunity for personal empowerment as individuals can step up and into new tasks and roles.
These logics, come out of research where I traced the fluidity within which activists organized and used space; how they provisioned, re/upcycled, used ‘things’; created ‘autonomous’ social dynamics; implemented a consensus by subtraction decision making process to fortify their personal autonomy; and conclude be claiming that ‘autonomy’ – as seen within my informants’ understandings, actions, and collective practices within the space – were more akin to anarchist, feminist, ableist, and eastern philosophical/Daoist understandings of personal integrated autonomy than to the atomized autonomous selves of ‘Western’ philosophical discourse; that a person's individual autonomy was actually accentuated by acting communally; and that autonomy should rather be seen as a feeling people have in relation to the infinite intersectional and sometimes coercive relationships they are surrounded by, and that these feelings should be ‘measured’ on a constantly changing spectrum as opposed to fixed relationships.
In this presentation, for the International Conference of Critical Geographies on the intersections of housing and inhabitation, I focus on how squatting a building within a collective, and creating a community that built upon personal autonomous interaction – collectivized through often momentary interpretations of shared principles and eventual social patterns – creates different relationships to the pressures of the outside capitalist world (such as increased material autonomy) which affords greater individual autonomy when working collectively together to share responsibilities across a community. For example, in a community that does not need to pay rent, dumpster dives for food and materials to upcycle, produces things using do-it-yourself principles, has equal access to the community’s ‘autonomous goods’ and tools, and works autonomously and collectively to live of the excesses of the capitalist system; the individual and financial inputs a person needs to put into the community are inherently decreased. As such, by working collectively within these autonomous principles, individuals are afforded the ability to live together – at low to no cost – within a modern principled collective, yet akin the ‘original affluent society’ Marshal Sahlins (1972) conceptualized about hunter gatherer communities. My research shows, that these types of communities offer alternative pathways for lower cost and climate aware strategies to inhabit housing and produce viable communities in ways more accessible for the less advantaged.