Evento

Keywords: the good life; dignified housing; Maya migration; Mexico

The quest for dignified housing has propelled housing activists and shaped housing policies. In Cancún, Mexico, real estate campaigns associate dignified housing with the “good life.” I consider contested notions of dignified housing and the “good life” and through a case study of Maya migrants in Cancún, a settler colonial city where pleasure and precarity coexist. Cancún’s hotel zone is marked by beautifully landscaped hotels and adventure parks, even as the city’s periphery is made up of a patchwork of informal settlements and tract housing. In such a place, the good life is based on a tourist imaginary, with leisure spaces created for tourists and where pleasure and consumption are the driving force. Yet, for the city’s working-class residents, the good life is manifested in a radically different geography: social housing developments made up of tract housing. These units are built on a mass scale in order to provide affordable housing to the city’s working class residents.

For Maya migrants, finding dignified housing is crucial to the notion of living the good life. Although housing developments have been touted as examples of the good life, Maya migrants do not consider these housing units with their tiny footprints and in some cases, shoddy construction, as fulfilling their notion of living the “good life.” Nor do they consider these units to meet the criteria for dignified housing. I explore the meanings of “the good life” and dignified housing held by Maya migrants in order to provide alternative frameworks of what housing justice might look like. For Maya migrants, the good life is rooted in the notion of convivencia/u kuxtal ye ́etel u m ́aatsil m ́aako’ob, a Maya ethic of sociality and care based on living together and caring for each other (Castellanos 2023). By engaging with convivencia, I unsettle the settler colonial legacies underpinning urban planning in Cancún and invoke Indigenous critiques that invite us to rethink housing activism.

Keywords: squatting; eviction; housing precarity

The physical removal of people from a space is generally regarded as the moment of eviction. However, that moment may represent the culmination of a lengthy and complex social and legal process involving several stages before the physical eviction itself (Kenna et al., 2018) as well as the subsequent and various consequences that evicted people may experience after the material removal – like that of becoming homeless, for instance, or finding a temporary/permanent new accommodation. Moreover, eviction is a multifaceted process calling into question different political and economic dynamics at a local and global level and involving not only evictees but also politicians, bureaucrats, police officers, landlords, and activists.

This paper aims to contribute to a more nuanced approach toward the lexicons of the Housing Struggle by reflecting upon two Italian housing-related concepts never adequately translated into English – sgombero and sfratto. Although in the Anglo-Saxon context, there is a single word to define these processes (eviction), in the Italian language, there are two translations of the latter term (sfratto; sgombero) which are related to two different social phenomena, even if they both share the loss of a house as a common feature. While the sfratto represents a legal device through which the conclusion of a lease is forced due to the breach of contractual agreements, the sgombero, on the other hand, represents both the act of clearing a space from its furniture and the outcome of an entry and stay in a property owned by others. In the first case, housing scholars in Italy usually refer to private apartments inhabited by tenants who cannot afford to pay rent anymore; in the second one, to the squatters of the collective occupation of abandoned buildings not initially designed for housing purposes (like former offices or schools) and led mainly by Housing Rights Movements.

This difference and its political and semantical complexity are not always evident to a non-Italian audience: sgombero is sometimes translated as ‘forced eviction’, even though also during a sfratto there is a massive use (and often violent) of police forces. The object of the paper is then to shed light on this political, etymological, and epistemological distinction through the preliminary results of an ongoing ethnographic research in Rome for the ‘Inhabiting Radical Housing’ ERC project based in Turin (Italy). Specifically, the study presented investigates the social, affective, and political effects that sgomberi have had (and still have) on the life of former squatters in Rome.

This ethnographic focus will be functional to introduce especially the local mediatic and institutional context, where squats are rarely described and treated as places where dispossessed and lowincome people live. Instead, they are largely criminalized as misappropriating spaces to circumvent the law and the regular housing lists, which leads to using a specific term such as sgombero, commonly employed with furniture and materials, depoliticizing and dehumanizing in this way the people involved.

During ethnographic work in an informal settlement in Chennai city, India, I observed that the word பிடிப்பு (pidippu) in Tamil seemed to feature often in the ways people spoke about spatial and material practices in the neighbourhood. The verb pidikka means to grab or capture, an act of encroachment, stealth, or sly appropriation. One didn’t just have, or passively possess land or a ration card, the government identification document that offered access to subsidized food and fuel through the public distribution system. Instead, one performed an active form of labor—to grab, as a form of active retaining, citizenship, itself. As employed by the urban poor, 'capture' refers both to the physical occupation of public land, as well as the deliberated labor of obtaining identity documents and other material and symbolic indicators of belonging that grant them legitimacy and de facto rights to occupy this land.

In this presentation, I will elaborate on how the process of capture is not simply an initial 'enclosure' of a piece of public land by those looking to live in the city, but an ongoing takeover of land within and at the edges over decades, the continual production of the slum both by the residents and the state, the latter through both active intervention and passive complicity.

Residents capture land not just to build their homes, but also community infrastructure that aid in the social reproduction of the settlement. A childcare center, for instance, served the purpose of helping women go to work and preserve their economic rights (பபண் களின் பபொருளொதொர உரிமை; penngalin porulaadhaara urimai) while their children were taken care of. It was also expected to stake a moral claim on urban land in the face of a possible eviction (Narayan 2023).

In the increasingly precarious landscapes of speculative urbanization and public land privatization, residents of informal settlements, predominantly belonging to oppressed castes, are subject to what activists call a new form of untouchability (நவீன தீண் டொமை; naveena theendamai) when they are removed from the city centre to its peripheries.

Resettlement housing, then, forms the new terrain of capture for the urban poor. Securing future urban shelter via accessing a resettlement flat is also now dependent on the possession of particular identity documents, involving what Veena Das (2011) calls a “labor of learning” how to navigate bureaucratic systems and secure objects with which incremental claims to citizenship can be made. Capture hence emerges as a form of labour by which residents in informal settlements secure citizenship in the present and future.

It is precisely this dimension of residents of informal settlements, their status and contributions to the city as labourers that has been devalued in the last few decades. The connection between the working classes and urban land, that it is in fact labourers who live in these so-called slum settlements, is fast disappearing. But significantly, the role of unwaged labour in creating the city itself is erased and invisibilized – and this is what capture or pidippu brings attention to. In being removed from the city, the urban poor are not only dispossessed of their ability to pursue a livelihood in the city, but also of the opportunity to create a city in their vision through self-styled innovative material, social, political practices. Consequently, they are forced to enter top-down paradigms of housing measured in terms of the actual dwelling and little else, with very little autonomy to change it, alienating them from urban lands as they get folded into capitalist circuits.

Marxist Feminist scholars including Alessandra Mezzadri (2015) argue that reproductive realms and activities absorb “the systematic externalization of reproductive costs by capital, working as a de facto subsidy to capital” (p. 33). Informal settlements are sites of social reproduction and care. Those who live in them are not only actually creating and maintaining the global city by providing labour to all the things that make it global - building its infrastructure, cleaning its streets, servicing its offices - but also producing those other inevitable, essential parts of the global city that reproduce its labour, but have now also become a blight on its globalness. Therefore, in emphasizing the labour involved in producing and reproducing the neighbourhood and the city, through framings of pidippu, residents of informal settlements are demanding recognition of their status as workers, which points to a powerful demand for the right to the city, in the face of mainstream discourse that deems them “encroachers.”

நகரை் என் பது நகரத்தின் பதொழிலொளிகளுக்கு!
(The city for its workers!; protest slogan)

Keywords: Territory; Latin American Geography; Occupations

Despite its widespread use by Latin American social movements, the concept of ‘territory’ has been overlooked by scholarship on housing activism, especially in the anglophone context. This paper looks at Brazilian housing struggles while bringing to light Latin American theorisations on territory. The paper pays specific attention to emerging forms of land occupation taking place at the fringes of Brazilian metropolises. These occupations are a product of highly organised processes involving residents, activists, planners and lawyers, rapidly appropriating large portions of land to conform planned self-built neighbourhoods which reclaim the use value of land and housing (Dias et al., 2018; Diniz Bastos et al., 2017; Morado Nascimento, 2016). The notion of ‘territory’ is commonly mobilised in the vocabularies of Latin American social movements. Such activist epistemology has inspired a rich situated geographical scholarship, which decolonises Anglophone notions of territory (Halvorsen, 2019). Thus, starting from the advantage point of Latin American theorisations on ‘territory’, the paper proposes four axes to look at Brazilian (peri) urban occupations: power, knowledge, scale and temporality.

Power: Territory is a productive concept to look at how power manifests in space (Haesbaert, 2020; Porto-Gonçalves, 2012). While traditional Anglophone understandings see territory as a means of control and ordering, Latin American perspectives advance the notion of territory as a coming together of domination and resistance (Halvorsen, 2019). As such, there is a need to focus on ‘used territories’, in which multiple political projects converge through conflictual forces emerging from the top-down and the bottom-up (Santos, 1999). Along these lines, the territories of Brazilian (peri) urban occupations are shaped by ongoing disputes with the state and the private sector, from resisting evictions to opening up spaces of negotiation and claiming for formalisation (Irazabal, 2018; Zhang, 2021).

Knowledge: As Latin American geographers argue, territorialities are always invented and imprint certain historical subjectivities. As such, Latin American cities have been shaped by the territoriality created and imposed by Portuguese and Spanish colonial states, embedded with values of modernity and private property (Porto-Gonçalves, 2012). While coloniality and its territorialities persists to present days (Quijano, 2000), Latin American social movements propose new emancipatory epistemologies in their territorialities, re-writing histories of modernity-coloniality from a subaltern standpoint. These movement-based territorialities not only reject hegemonic knowledge, but also appropriate, resignify and sometimes reproduce it (Porto-Gonçalves, 2012). In this way, Brazilian (peri) urban occupations conform territorialities by appropriating official discourses and technologies, usually supported by the expertise of planners and lawyers (Dias et al., 2018; Diniz Bastos et al., 2017; Morado Nascimento, 2016). Meanwhile, notions of private property are not only rejected, but also ressignified, as occupations make use of the legal apparatus around the ‘social function of property’ (Dias et al., 2018).

Scale: As Latin American geographers argue, territories are made and remade through the articulation of multiple scales. Meanwhile, scales are prone to contestation, being forged and gaining meaning through the agency of various subjects and the power relations between them. As such, territorial struggles act beyond the local, moving upwards to reach national and global realms and strengthen their fights (Porto-Gonçalves, 2012). Accordingly, Brazilian (peri) urban occupations are part of multiscalar networked articulations, mediated through nationally-based housing movements. Such articulations open up to translocal collaborations and engagements with multiple levels of governance (Dias et al., 2018). Latin American geographers also bring attention to the scale of the body, through the notion of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory). Such feminist readings of territory highlight the body, with its emotions and intimacies, as a fundamental scale of not only biopolitical power but also corporeal resistance (Haesbaert, 2020). As such, in occupations the bodies of residents and activists are major sites of territorial control and contestation. While embodied personal histories of oppression shape the disposability of marginalised residents, bodies act as powerful tools to resist evictions and transform territories.

Temporality: Latin American geographers see territory as a coming together of past, present and future. Territories are thus understood as ‘events’, i.e. as present instances shaped by particular histories but also as possibilities for anticipated futures (Santos, 1999). Brazilian (peri) urban occupations are a product of long-standing histories of coloniality, and also feed from the experiences of previous territorial struggles. At the same time, occupations operate through anticipation. Predicting future legislation, activists appropriate land designated as social housing and follow local planning regulations in the division of plots. Additionally, Latin American geographers see territories as processes, as being in constant transformation (Santos, 1999). Social movements’ territories are not just the locus of resistencia (resistance), but mostly or r-existencia (r-existence). In other words, more than reacting to a previous provocation, they shape and reinvent emancipatory modes of being (Porto-Gonçalves, 2012). As such, the struggle around occupations does not end after materialisation. Rather, it perpetuates through an ongoing politics of consolidation, legitimacy and negotiation, gradually shaping residents’ collective identities and political subjectivities (Dias et al., 2018).

Therefore, the paper will shed light on ‘territory’ and its Latin American situated conceptualisations as a critical, despite often neglected, vocabulary to look at housing activism. Although connected to the Brazilian context, the propositions presented in the paper could be used to look at other housing struggles as fundamentally territorial, articulating issues of power, knowledge, scale and temporality.

Key Words: Language justice, praxis, tenant unions, autonomous

Scholars and organizers in the United States committed to building multi-racial mass movements agree that language justice matters and recognize that centering immigrants for whom English is not a primary language should be a priority. However, while there is broad consensus that organizing should not be English-dominant, there is a gap in implementation of language justice practices. Scholars and organizers of decolonial communication and language justice, such as Allison Corbett, Antena Aire, Vincenzo Raimondi, and Communities Creating Healthy Environments (CCHE), assert that multilingual organizing must incorporate a commitment to language equity. Doing so not only challenges language dominance, but also aims to construct spaces in which questions of justice, power, and repair are taken seriously. While several of these scholars detail the practical dimensions of such endeavors, their works, and the language justice discourse at large, obfuscate the reality of implementation within resource deprived locals. The existing literature minimizes the difficulty small organizations often face in fairly compensating interpreters, conducting community based needs-assessments, training its multilingual members, and communicating the untranslatable. In this way, they do not fully address the very real discontinuity between practices of interpretation/translation and attempts to move beyond a unidirectional interpretive frame. These difficulties are arguably heightened within the context of autonomous tenant unions, which do not accept external funds in order to maintain working-class control. For autonomous tenant organizations who are combating the ongoing housing crisis driven by privatization and land commodification, this organizing is urgent and time and funds are scarce.

The question of language justice, accessibility, and resisting English-dominance is a pressing one for US tenant unionists fighting gentrification and displacement. The ability of tenant organizations to organize effectively across linguistic divides has spatial consequences in the struggle for community control of land, since it can be a determining factor in what populations are at higher risk for eviction and displacement. As member-organizers of the Crown Heights Tenant Union (CHTU), an autonomous union in Brooklyn, New York, we have witnessed the on-the-ground struggle to combat English dominance even as we aim to build a strong multilingual, multiethnic, and multiracial coalition of tenants to resist rampant displacement. Such a shortcoming stands in stark opposition to the polycultural realities of our socio-spatial location. While Crown Heights is currently on the leading edge of gentrification in Brooklyn (a land originally belonging to the indigenous Munsee Lenape peoples), it has more recently served as a common destination for Caribbean migrants (historically descendents of European colonization, indentured servitude, and trans-Atlantice slavery), since passage of the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act. Due to these migration patterns, thousands of households speak Spanish, French, and Haitian-Creole. In addition, Crown Heights hosts the world headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish movement, tens of thousands of whom speak Yiddish and/or Hebrew. Given this, the dominance of English in our union organizing has served as a well-known barrier to union participation by neighbors who primarily speak non-English languages. For example, although our union is celebrating its ten year anniversary, we do not have any established practices regarding translation or interpretation. While the issue is widely acknowledged in the union, the labor to make our organizing spaces more multilingual continues to fall to the few bilingual members. Even within the three of us, a multiracial group of millennial women, the responsibility of interpretation and translation falls more to Patricia as a Spanish speaker.

This paper is a study of the language justice praxis of three autonomous unions fighting for working class control of space: the CHTU, the Los Angeles Tenant Union (LATU), and the Tenant and Neighborhood Council (TANC) in the Bay Area. Acknowledging the discontinuity between values of language justice and practice in the CHTU, we aim to gather lessons from the two California-based unions with more robust multilingual programs. LATU was founded in 2015 by Spanish and English speakers as a bilingual, autonomous union, and is leading the tenant movement in language justice practices. In contrast, TANC was originally founded in 2018 as an English-dominant organization that is now in the early stages of implementing multilingual practices. Through interviews with organizers in both unions who have been successful in incorporating language justice praxis, and tenants for whom English is not their first language – recognizing that these groups overlap – we aim to use this paper to create a resource for tenant unions across the country. In particular, we will address how our findings inform the language justice program we implement within the Crown Heights Tenant Union. In doing so, we offer a bridge between academic discourse emphasizing the necessity of language justice and the challenges of implementation in under-resourced movement organizations. Ultimately, we hope to move the language justice discourse beyond its current resource-dependent conceptions and towards a version that is more practical for those in autonomous organizing spaces.

Keywords: collective self-organized housing, housing cooperatives, conceptualization, social production, and management of habitat, Colombia

Housing cooperatives are being reconsidered in many countries and cities worldwide as potentially relevant actors in the provision of affordable housing. This is also the case in several Latin American countries, where a renewed interest in this form of housing calls for a need to clarify some of the concepts that delimitate this field of study, not through a European lense, where most of the scientific literature on collaborative housing stems from, but from a Latin American perspective. We argue that the concept of “social production and management of housing” provides a useful framework that encompasses a wide range of collective self-organized forms of housing provision in Latin America, but that also requires more precise differentiations and distinctions. In this paper we aim to contribute to this conceptual framework by looking at the case of Colombia, where there is a range of collective forms of housing ensured by law but where they continue to struggle to negotiate a space within the national housing system. We will provide analysing dimensions or attributes stemming from a systematic literature review and empirical case studies.

In a global context characterised by governmental withdrawal from the housing sector and the inability of the private sector to cater to the needs of low-income people, housing cooperatives are remerging as a potentially viable strategy to tackle global housing challenges. This is also the case in several Latin American countries, characterised by neoliberal housing regimes that have led to an increasing financialization of housing and marginalisation of the poor while simultaneously sharing a long history of community led and mutual-aid housing production. This ‘social production of habitat’, as it is conceptualized in Latin America, has taken many forms, ranging from informal initiatives to institutionalised and government supported approaches like housing cooperatives, which play an important role in the provision of adequate housing in countries like Uruguay, but that continue to struggle to establish themselves in other countries across the region. Such is the case in Colombia where emerging cooperative initiatives as well as other collective forms of housing production and management face challenges in establishing themselves within the national housing system. To further understand the main challenges faced as well as their potential role, we argue that it is essential to first give conceptual clarity to the field of study of collective self-organized forms of housing provision in Latin America: what types of collective self-organized forms of housing exists and what are their shared and contrasting attributes? In this paper we aim to present analysing dimensions or attributes for an empirically grounded typology of collective self-organized forms of housing provision in Colombia. These attributes will be defined through a combination of concepts defined in literature, with a special focus on Latin American housing studies, social production of habitat and empirical cases. For this we will conduct a systematic literature review and a review of selected case studies.

The growing body of scientific literature on cooperative housing has mostly centred around European experiences and based on conceptual frameworks emerging from this context (Baiges et al., 2020; Czischke, 2018; Ferreri & Vidal, 2022; Lang et al., 2020; Sørvoll & Bengtsson, 2020; Tummers, 2016). As self-produced and managed housing that is neither led by the state or the private sector, housing cooperatives initiatives in Latin America are conceptualized within practices of social production and management of habitat – in spanish produccion y gestion social del habitat - PGSH. The concept emerges not from academic debates but from grassroots social movements, human rights activists, non-governmental organizations, and academic groups coming together in defence of popular urban processes, the vindication of housing rights, and the articulation of common struggles (Zapata & Parra, 2020). In this sense PGSH seeks to provide a conceptual framework that defines these processes as well as legitimize and advocate for their recognition as key players in the provision of housing.

According to Ortiz (2012:73), the term can be defined as self-managed and self-produced housing by residents and other social agents that operate on a non-profit basis. It embraces both individual and collective processes that take place outside market or state-led production in both urban and rural areas, ranging from spontaneous individual self-production of housing to collective production (Ortiz, 2012; Torres, 2006; Varnai, 2015). By recognizing the use value of housing over its exchange-value, the end-user is at the centre of the decision-making process at all stages of housing production. Furthermore, in its conceptualization, PGSH highlights housing as a process responding to both the changing needs and available resources of its inhabitants (2012, p. 19). Proponents of PGSH highlight the potential of these processes to enhance management and collective action capacities and efforts, which leads to more participatory and democratic processes (2012, p. 76).

In sum, PGSH is a concept that has been used to destigmatize most informal housing production. However, in its attempt to be both a concept for describing and analysing all forms of housing production outside the state or private market, while simultaneously being politically used as an advocacy tool, it can be perceived as a fuzzy concept. It fails to fully address particularities and distinctions between for example urban and rural contexts, formal and informal processes, different forms of tenure, and collective and individual self-production and management (Varnai, 2015).

By reviewing the case of Colombia, in this paper we aim to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of collective self-organized forms of housing provision not only as a conceptual contribution to the field of housing studies in Latin America but also hopefully to inform public policies.
*This paper is part of a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation titled “Negotiating Space for Housing Cooperatives in Latin America: the case of post-conflict Colombia and El Salvador. It will be presented in both Spanish and English.