This article theorizes the making and unmaking of the urban housing commons in Amsterdam. The article reviews the literature on the urban housing commons, sets out the analytics of use values and exchange values for housing, and situates these analytics within the transition from dominance of industrial to finance capital in the Netherlands during neoliberalization from the mid-1970s to the present. A vibrant housing commons in Amsterdam came into existence by the 1980s because of two social movements that pressed the Dutch state to institutionalize this commons—the New Left movement within the Dutch Labor Party, and the squatters’ movement in Amsterdam. The subsequent shift in dominance from industrial to finance capital has led to the decline of both movements and the erosion of the housing commons.
AwardBig Squeak: Louise Lamphere, AAA President-elect and winner of COSWA 's 1998 Squeaky Wheel Award. {Photo by Raymond W Holman, Jr)The Squeaky Wheel Award is presented by the Committee on the Status of Women in Anthropology (COSWA) to recognize individuals who have demonstrated the courage to bring to light and investigate practices in anthro-' pology that are potentially discriminatory to women or have acted to improve the status of women in anthropology through activities that raise awareness of women's contribution to anthropology or identify barriers to full participation by women in anthropology.
This is a deeply important book for all scholars of China, and it is a timely one as well. It is timely in a number of ways that in 2019 not even the author (nor any of us) could have foreseen. Since the publication of the book, the Covid-19 pandemic emerged in southern Chinasomething that the author's concern with intensified urbanization in China, the environmental crisis this process causes, and its coming developmental impasse are actually quite relevant to, as I point out below. Since 2019 we have also witnessed the progressive breakdown in the intergovernmental relationship between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the United States, in terms of the ongoing trade dispute, but far beyond that in the direction of an xenophobia and nationalism initiated by the ugly racist attacks by the Trump administration and its white supremacist allies on Chinese students, Chinese public health (e.g. "kung-flu"), cultural attacks on Chinese diets, and most recently initiated threatened sanctions against members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and their families. These attacks are all driven by the narcissism of a U.S. president hell-bent on his own reelection at any cost. The animosity has become mutual, as Chinese nationalism under Xi Jinping has intensified, with deportations of foreign journalists investigating the PRC government's treatment of Uyghurs and the Hong Kong protests against PRC rule, and the probable suspension of study abroad programs for students from both countries. As Covid-19 continues to spread in the United States, PRC students find the U.S. visa and immigration regime increasingly onerous, and the Chinese government retaliates in kind. One cannot help but sense that scholars of China now find themselves facing a conjunctural tipping point that threatens not only the future of US-China relations in a broad sense, but also the specific futures of the research and cultural collaborations that many of us have built assiduously with Chinese colleagues over the last several decades. And this process of schismogenesis may continue even if Trump is not reelected in November 2020. Much is at stake in the current moment, and much is in play in such a conjunctureprecisely where a good public intellectual intervention like Daniel Vukovich's book and its circulation can make a real difference. It is therefore now not only timely but also important to consider the arguments set out in
On Juneteenth, Friday, June 19, 2020, unionized workers of the Durham Workers Assembly of Durham, North Carolina, held a rally in front of Durham Police Headquarters to “defund the police” in support of the national Black Lives Matter movement protesting in massive numbers in the streets of US cities and being met with overwhelming police repression. Black Lives Matter marches in the streets of cities and towns of the United States continued, as the world looked on.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.