Radical housing: on the politics of dwelling as difference

Abstract

Urbanites worldwide fight for their right to housing and the city in ways that encompass what Westernized and masculine takes on ‘radical politics’ make of them. This intervention proposes a decolonial, grounded and feminist approach to investigate how resistance to housing precarity emerges from uncanny places, uninhabitable ‘homes’ and marginal propositions. This is a form of ‘dwelling as difference’ that is able to challenge our compromised ‘habitus’ of home at its root, from the ground of its everyday unfolding. The article argues that only looking within those cracks, and aligning to their politics, new radical housing futures can be built with urbanites worldwide.

Keywords:

• Dwelling
• radical politics
• housing precarity
• resistance
• right to the city
• housing movement
• propositional politics

Acknowledgements

There are too many people to whom I am indebted, too many who have contributed to the making of this piece, mostly unknowingly. I want to thank my comrades of the Common Front for the Right to Housing (FCDL), because it is only thanks to what we shared and continue to share in Bucharest and beyond that some of these reasonings could come to the fore. For the same reason I thank the RHJ collective, because together we are building a different home for the production of knowledge around radical housing. Thanks also to the generosity of my colleagues at Sheffield, those in the UI and those outside, in particular Ryan Powell and John Flint, for dragging me further down the road of this housing conundrum. Special thanks to AbdouMaliq Simone, Melissa Fernández-Arrigoitia and Kiera Chapman for their comments on an earlier draft of this work. Finally, all my gratitude goes to Emma Power and Dallas Rogers of the International Journal of Housing Policy for their incredible support. And to Leo, and poetry, for keeping this whole assemblage going. This paper was originally presented as one of the keynotes at the Housing Studies Association conference in Sheffield, UK, April 2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Which I have co-founded and now edit with a collective of around 13 scholars scattered across the globe. Further information and manifesto at www.radicalhousingjournal.org

2 I will focus mostly on the intersection of housing and the urban form, given the pressing developments worldwide and my own interests.

3 The recent contribution of Natalie Oswin in relation to the framework of ‘planetary urbanization’ is particular salient in this sense (Oswin, 2018).

4 Or why, when they are approached in terms of housing struggles, is the scholarship that emerges filed under ‘development studies’ (or studies of ‘urban informality’) rather than ‘radical housing’?

5 There are of course excellent exceptions to this reading. See for instance the work of Gowan (2010), Sparks (2017), McCarthy (2017) and also my own. None of these is, however, counted as progressive housing scholarship, but is relegated within debates concerned with the anthropology of homelessness.

6 Again, when this is done, contributions do not fall within the remit of radical housing scholarship (see for instance Maestri, 2017; Grazioli, 2017)

7 The last case seems to be that related to the acclaimed work of Desmond, on evictions in the USA context. As Aiello and others have showed (Aiello et al., 2018), what seemed to be a rather in-depth account of evictions in Milwaukee is in reality a study populated by a very problematic use of qualitative and quantitative data, which ends up undermining the politics of life and liberation underpinning housing precarity and struggles in the USA. Aiello and her colleagues need to be commended for their constructive critique of an otherwise a-critically universally acclaimed research.

8 I am indebted, in my way of thinking the margins, to the fundamental scholarship of the feminist black Chicana scholar and artist Gloria E. Anzaldúa. Light in the dark/Luz en lo Oscuro is the title of her last book, published after her death. These and other notions will be engaged with further in another publication.

9 Audio-recorded conversation, reported in Lancione, 2019

10 Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, a grassroots housing group which emerged in the wake of the post-2008 crisis in Spain. It helped to stop thousands of evictions affecting Spaniards at all levels by adopting direct housing actions but also by providing grassroots-led and horizontally-structured group support to its members (at its peak, it had more than 150 active groups across the country). One of the spokespersons of La PAH, Ada Colau, was elected Mayor of Barcelona in 2015.

11 Sí se puede. Siete días en PAH Barcelona, 2014. Available at https://vimeo.com/323297000