In the past decades, housing has re-emerged as a significant field of theory and policy as well as of action. Academic studies have meticulously analysed housing production in advanced capitalist cities as well as housing policies brought forward to address housing needs and inequalities urban dwellers are facing in the past as well as in the present, and they have sought to analyse the different characteristics and causes of housing crises in different cities and times. From a different perspective, housing movements and struggles have also attracted scholarly interest, but they have also produced crucial material (both in claims-making and in political and social organising and mobilising). At the same time, the ways housing struggles transform the landscape of housing-related policies and shape the urban environment have also attracted scholarly interest. As crises continue to unfold and interweave, one aspect that has been missing from the aforementioned discussions, is to understand how struggles, claims for and significations of the rights to housing are transformed and reformulated vis-à-vis the different crises.
The aim of this report is to summarise questions and debates on:
- Crises as meaning and policy producing conjunctures;
- The right to housing within the broader context of the discussion on rights and legal geographies;
- Housing struggles as urban political struggles; and
- Inter-relations of housing struggles and housing traditions.
HousInC – Deliverable report D.2.1 – Housing Struggles in the intersection of crises