Struggling for Housing Justice – New Theoretical and Methodological Approaches

ABSTRACT

How can struggles for housing justice act as a lens to expand housing researchers’ understanding of the rental crisis and of the systems that underpin this crisis? By presenting papers from Sweden, Spain, Greece, the UK, and Australia this special issue contributes with knowledge on how housing struggles can inform new theoretical and methodological approaches within the field of housing studies. In turn, the SI presents three tenets that together form a framework for housing scholars: institutionalization as politics, tenants as political actors, and learning housing justice. We argue that it is crucial for housing scholars to recenter on struggles for housing justice in their readings of contemporary housing systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing justice
• rental struggles
• activist research
• rental crisis
• financialisation
• housing systems

Introduction

Why do we need a special issue on the struggles for housing justice in Housing, Theory & Society? Globalization and financialization have strengthened the role of financial landlords and created new market segments for these actors to enter, and focusing on the tenant-landlord relationship has become a matter of urgency (e.g. Aalbers 2019; August and Walks 2018; Beswick et al. 2016; Crosby 2020; Fields 2017a, 2017b, 2018); Gutiérrez-Cueli et al. 2023, 2017b; 2018; García-Lamarca 2021; Goulding 2024; Gustafsson 2024; Janoschka et al., 2020; Lima 2020; Migozzi 2020; Nascimento Neto and Salinas Arreortua 2019; Rolnik 2019; Teresa 2019). In 2022, Financial Times acknowledged tenants’ struggle for their right to stay put and for their right to affordable and decent housing as a “global rental crisis” that has been deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic (Cox 2022). Today, in 2024, the cost-of-living crisis has put further pressure on tenants (Coi 2023). The insurgence of housing struggles in Europe can partly be explained by the aftermath of the global financial crisis, but also by centuries of austerity policies (Dewilde 2018). Housing has become a key asset for the accumulation of wealth in a rentierized economy (Smith et al. 2022). Homeownership is no longer the key driver. Institutional investors and corporate landlords’ ownership of residential housing produces inequality by extracting value from assets, but also by reproducing unaffordability and precarity for residents, particularly for low-income renters (Christophers 2021; Dewilde 2018; García-Lamarca 2021).

This special issue seeks to reconceptualize how struggles for the right to housing can act as a lens to expand our understanding of the rental crisis and of the systems and institutions that underpin this crisis. The tenant-landlord relationship was historically key to the development of the rental and housing system, and this relationship remains as a crucial lens for housing scholars to understand and make visible contemporary challenges for local and national governments. The contributions in this special issue create a dialogue between historical examples of mobilizations for common housing and more present housing struggles and movements. We maintain that such analysis of contemporary and historical claims for housing dignity (Listerborn, Molina, and Richard 2020) is of paramount importance for housing scholars to learn from, as these inquiries offer a lens through which we can envision a future and more just housing provision. As we present below, this lens can centre around the three tenets that together form a theoretical and methodological framework for housing scholars: institutionalization as politics, tenants as political actors, and learning housing justice.

This issue contributes to the broader field of housing studies by using housing struggles and activism as a steppingstone for the development of new theoretical and methodological approaches. In the words of housing researcher Jim Kemeny, housing studies suffer from a “narrow focus on housing policy and housing markets, and neglect broader issues” (Kemeny 1992, xv). By centring on the experiences of residents and housing struggles in re-theorizing housing, we follow Aalbers’ and Christophers’ (Aalbers and Christophers 2014, 374) emphasis on moving beyond a one-dimensional analysis of “housing-as-policy” or “housing-as-market”. Reflecting on housing’s role in the political economy, Aalbers and Christophers (2014) address housing’s materiality and fixity in place, mediating flows of money and finance, while housing is simultaneously formed through social relations and power. Soederberg (2021, 37) frames this as a tension between housing as a site for accumulation and a place for survival. Crucially, housing is lived and experienced, and the systems and institutions that condition these lived experiences can only be fully understood when we theorize from tenants’ points of view.

Extensive previous scholarship exists on the emergence of housing movements and struggles in relation to the neoliberalization and financialization of housing. This editorial introduction does not aim to represent the breadth of this salient research frontier, but earlier studies have highlighted squatting and social mobilization in Spain (Martínez 2019, 2020), the creation of solidarity networks to house refugees in Greece (Kapsali 2020), activism against financialized landlordism in Canada (Risager 2021), community resistance in New York (Fields 2015), urban activism in Poland (V. Polanska 2020), and the formation of new kinds of tenant resistance against renovictions in Sweden (Listerborn, Molina, and Richard 2020). Tenant mobilization includes reworking the activist toolkit, which has been exemplified by the development of digital tools to trace and confront evictions and predatory landlords in the context of tenant screening and data capturing in the US (McElroy 2023). Additionally, several special issues have centred on different forms of housing activism (Polanska, Valenzuela-Fuentes, and Kaun 2019), housing struggles following the COVID-19 crisis (RHJ Editorial Collective 2020), resistance to the financialization of housing in the Global South and North (Çelik 2024), and how housing activism fosters care work in the context of racial capitalism and settler colonialism (Fields, Power, and Card 2024).

This rich literature reflects the surge of tenant mobilization that has taken place after the global financial crisis in 2008, and as Card (2024) pinpoints, tenant movements across the Atlantic have been able to influence policy development, for instance, by turning from defensive towards offensive “policy strategies”, including rent controls and bills for expropriation. Given this dialectic relationship between housing struggles and housing policy and systems, it is crucial to expand our knowledge on how housing struggles can be used as a lens for housing scholars to develop their analysis of housing systems themselves. Addressing this lacuna, this special issue contributes with knowledge on how housing struggles can inform new theoretical and methodological approaches. Hence, we aim to return the analytical focus to studies of housing struggles over time and across national contexts. In turn, the articles in this special issue present in-depth engagements with complex housing struggles and how they relate to housing systems, which leads to the insight that close theoretical, empirical, and practical engagements with housing struggles are necessary to achieve housing justice. Furthermore, claims for housing justice manifest in different ways and within the context of different housing systems. The above-mentioned studies and the contributions in this special issue are located in diverse housing contexts. Importantly, political struggles for housing justice are formed through their distinct contingencies, where countries not only have divergent housing systems but also different histories of housing movements and activism.

The contributions of this special issue centre around three inseparable themes that shed light on how housing struggles can serve as a lens to reconceptualize housing systems: institutionalization as politics, tenants as political actors, and learning housing justice. These themes are drawn from some of the most acute conflicts experienced by tenants and residents in Sweden, Spain, Greece, and the UK, but also beyond Europe; the introductory article highlights important experiences from Australia. In the following sections, we briefly introduce these themes and summarize the issue’s contributions. In the final section, we reflect on how ongoing crises make it even more necessary for housing scholars to engage with the practices and knowledge of housing activism. We want to thank all the authors in this volume, the anonymous referees, and the editors of the journal for their enthusiasm and support from the very beginning of this project.

Institutionalization As Politics

Following Martínez (2020), we understand institutionalization as the process in which radical social movements become embedded, for instance, through legalization in existing political, economic, and legal networks. Institutionalization is not a simple, linear process; however, instead it is contingent on past trajectories, multidimensional power relations, and multiscalar processes. In turn, institutionalization can include de-radicalization of social movements as well as the inscription of radical elements into new formal political and economic institutions (Martínez 2020). In fact, institutionalization is a deeply political process in which outcomes of social movements, i.e. collective agency, cannot be decided by political or economic structures. In viewing the institutionalization of social movements, that is, institutionalization as politics, in this way, we suggest a dialectical view of movements and “socio-spatial structures” (Martínez 2020, 39–41). The studies in this special issue illustrate this complexity. For instance, Ferreri (2024) (drawing on Martínez) engages with the concept of precarious institutionalization, offering a historical analysis of the squatting movement in London. Exploring the housing common literature, Ferreri (2024) investigates short-life housing co-operatives – established by squatters – from the 1970s and onwards and how they exemplify a flexible, or precarious, institutionalization. These short-life co-ops became viable affordable housing solutions – sometimes over a longer period – balancing on the margins of the formal housing system. Sometimes, these co-ops became embedded in the formal “state” institutions through grants or lease negotiations; over time however, their marginal and precarious position, together with deflated state funding, led to a decline of this kind of urban commons. Ferreri’s article on short-life co-ops exemplifies how housing activism and institutionalizations have mattered for the formation of housing systems. While on “the margins”, the case illustrates the dialectic relationship between the agency of movements and the regulatory and structural setting. The movement between activism and the regulatory setting is also explored by Gil and Palomera (2024), who build on their long participation in housing movements to analyse the formation of tenants’ unions in Madrid and Barcelona as a counter-hegemonic legislative strategy. As these movements engage in civil disobedience, media campaigns, and strategic political action, they have been able to contest neoliberal housing policy as well as contribute to the promotion of post-neoliberal housing policies, which the authors define as “reducing housing assetisation, rent extraction from housing, and housing financialisation in general” (Gil and Palomera 2024, 4).

Tenants As Political Actors

Several of the special issue’s contributions mirror Ananya Roy’s conceptual framework on recentering on housing justice and tenants’ struggles. Citing a Tenant Union representative, Roy writes that the crisis is not a housing crisis but “a tenants’ rights crisis” (Roy 2019, 15). In line with earlier calls made by several housing and urban scholars (e.g. Cociña et al. 2019), this special issue seeks to bring to the forefront the urgency of recentering on tenants as political subjects whose experiences are key for understanding the fractures in present housing institutions and systems. Importantly, however, tenants are also key actors in shaping their homes and the socio-material basis via which the landlord extracts value. As Byrne suggests the home “is a product of the tenant’s own practical activity and labour, as it is (in part) the result of the practices of home-making and social reproduction which constitute the home as a specific type of place” (Byrne 2022, emphasis in original). However, the tenants do not only produce place-specific meanings for themselves; “the residential rent relation” as Byrne (2022) calls it, also entails that “the landlord’s control of the dwelling constitutes a significant form of social power over the tenant’s life and this power is the political basis of the economic extraction of rent from the tenant” (emphasis in original). Tenants’ responses to precarious housing situations, then, go beyond issues of regulation or maintenance into deeper layers of political and economic relations.

Tenants’ precariousness is thus a state and a position through which housing as a site for survival is contested, renegotiated, and reproduced. Housing precariousness could be described as being housed on the margins of society with temporary and insecure contracts. Precariousness, then, is a social position in which people are at a greater risk of experiencing situations where they feel vulnerable, exposed, excluded, and neglected (Clair et al. 2019). The temporality and the insecurity of a precarious housing situation shapes everyday practices and the organization of life, but precarity does not mean passivity. On the contrary, one must be active to find housing and remain housed. Living precariously means developing a certain expertise about the workings of the “hidden” housing market (Listerborn 2023). This social position is racialized and gendered, and the housing precariat often lacks a “voice” or a spokesperson. Bringing in a deeper understanding of the role of housing precariousness into housing theory necessitates an intersectional perspective on what it means to be housed at the margins of the society. In this special issue, Gutiérrez-Cueli et al. (2023) draw on such an intersectional analysis of housing struggles and social reproduction in light of housing financialization in Spain, operationalizing and arguing for an understanding of a “double horizon of political temporality”. The authors engage with this concept to analyse how working-class migrant women as housing activists mobilize to combat urgent housing precarity whilst simultaneously pushing for demands for a more long-term just society that includes more secure and affordable housing. Kapsali’s (2024) contribution to this issue also emphasizes how tenants are political subjects. Her study is located in the Greek experience of three converging crises: the financial crisis, the refugee “crisis”, and the pandemic. Engaging with the concept of transversal politics and solidarities, Kapsali uses a feminist lens to analyse how a diverse tenant community consisting of both local Greek tenants and migrant tenants forms a resistance built on their experience of precarity produced by the intersecting crises.

Housing struggles extend the walls of the home and to the outdoor environments of housing estates. Richard’s (2024) analysis of neighbourhood changes in Uppsala, Sweden, in this issue centres on the process of “place destruction”. She investigates how property owners’ destruction of green space affects tenants, and how an intersectional and small-scale resistance keeps a sentiment of homemaking alive. Richard’s account offers a contrasting picture to the well-known strong tenant security in the Swedish setting.

The above-mentioned texts are important contributions to the housing research field. They all highlight how crises produce the urgent need for political action, how precarity may create commonalities among otherwise diverse populations, and how feminist and intersectional theory are important for the housing research field in order to understand the complex and intersecting processes and experiences enmeshed in today’s highly pressured housing systems. This raises the issue of how housing scholars learn and (co-)produce knowledge about housing justice.

Learning Housing Justice

Several of the special issue’s contributions scrutinize how housing justice is learned and practiced. Here as well, Roy (2019, 17) reminds us how “[r]esearch justice is concerned with the accumulation of knowledge for the purpose of structural transformation”. How housing researchers create and circulate knowledge through academia as well as activism is thus key for achieving housing justice. When it comes to methodological challenges, studying housing struggles has given scholars the opportunity to review traditional research approaches from research on the field in several critical manners. Recent scholarship shows a dynamic methodological development in which issues like the incorporation of intersectional perspectives have become central. The relational character of intersectionality, as it is discussed in Kapsali’s, Richard’s, and Gutiérrez et al.’s contributions to this special issue has opened up the field of housing studies into a rich spectrum of both theoretical and methodological perspectives. One of the main outcomes related to the collected contributions, should be the insight that no research on housing activism is possible without an unequivocal focus on the actors involved in the struggles. Several of the authors point out the importance of giving the struggling residents the main role in the narratives and the processes analysed, rather than viewing them as objects of study. They become participants rather than informants, and their work is what Choudry (2013, 84) would call a “highly relational form of knowledge construction”.

While the works in this collection are based on qualitative research methods, this does not imply a rejection of quantitative methods, which are in fact a more established tradition in housing studies (du Toit et al. 2022). As Hatch et al (2023) put it when presenting the concept of data feminism to study evictions, the way in which data is collected and analysed is more important than the kind of data used. All the articles in this volume align with such reflexive methodologies, but this is particularly explicit in the final contribution that we will present in this editorial: the introductory article by Chatterjee, Sisson, and Condie. The article discusses the important relationship between scholarship and activism, offering “a conceptual ‘guide for action’” to housing research. While the other contributions elucidate contemporary and historical housing activism more explicitly, Chatterjee, Sisson and Condie (2024) put the focus on us as researchers and on our possibility and responsibility to work more closely with ongoing struggles for housing justice. They describe how scholars can be important for the documentation of housing struggles, both through traditional tools such as archiving, but also in more creative ways, for instance, by filming or through social media. Scholars can also offer housing activism important supplemental tools and networks, supporting it practically, financially, and conceptually. Finally, Chatterjee, Sisson, and Condie highlight how scholars need to reconceptualize housing beyond its materiality by placing it in the wider political realm. The authors offer three illuminating examples of how housing is embedded in structural racism, community participation, and rights to land in a colonial setting. Together with the other articles, the special issue critically explores and expands on how housing studies can be enriched by, and have exchanges with, the practices used and the knowledge produced by housing activism.

Towards Housing Justice

This issue’s editors are all based in Sweden and would hereby like to take the opportunity to commemorate the fact that last year, 2023, marked the 100^th anniversary of the Swedish Union of Tenants. The union formed out of a multiplicity of local struggles in 1923 (Rolf 2020). Although strongly institutionalized within Sweden’s housing system, today it faces challenges both from a more financialized housing market as well as from the less-formalized tenant resistance networks, putting light on the union’s inability to fully respond and act on the deep precarity witnessed by tenants (Listerborn, Molina, and Richard 2020). The anniversary coincided with a new rent-setting praxis¹ which, paralleled with the cost-of-living crisis, has caused rent levels to spike in Sweden, reminding us of how contemporary rental struggles echo the demands of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The working-class population of the time was newly urbanized and industrialized and bore witness to poor living situations, as capital wealth and speculation were highly unregulated. Today, after decades of Keynesian politics and stabilization of inequality rates, capital seems once again to be back as a basis for deepening inequalities, not only in Sweden but across national contexts (Smith et al. 2022). Hence, this editorial and the special issue’s contributions have argued that it is crucial for housing scholars to recenter on struggles for housing justice in their readings of contemporary housing systems. The need for an institutionalization of housing justice, driven by tenant actions and the popular and academic circulation of radical knowledge has been made even more urgent by the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, and devastating wars. Here, scholars can play an important role by learning from activism, and also by contributing to rental activism and to solutions for housing justice.

Statement of Novelty

This is the editorial introduction for the special issue Struggling for Housing Justice – New theoretical and methodological approaches. The special issue contributes with knowledge on how housing struggles can inform new theoretical and methodological approaches within the field of housing studies. In turn, the SI presents three tenets that together form a framework for housing scholars: institutionalization as politics, tenants as political actors, and learning housing justice. We argue that it is crucial for housing scholars to recenter on struggles for housing justice in their readings of contemporary housing systems.

Acknowledgments

We want to thank all the authors in this volume, the anonymous referees, and the editors of the journal for their enthusiasm and support from the very beginning of this project.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas [2022-01384_3].

Notes

1. The rental market stakeholders in Sweden have come to an agreement to negotiate the use-value rent levels following a set of parameters, balancing it towards the inflation-rate (among other things), consequently causing higher rent increases than in previous years.