This article considers how insurgent campaigns for housing the poor in New York City and Chicago succeeded in engaging the local state, non-profits and financial institutions in the creation of community land trusts. These campaigns had long arcs in which victories and losses built from each other, neither as permanent as they initially seemed. The campaigns moved iteratively between spaces of "invited citizenship" (courtrooms, planning committees) and "invented" spaces of collective action (property takeovers). They found their greatest success when, exploiting state incapacity to defend abandoned property, they elicited a degree of complicity from local governments in their takeovers of housing and land. The article thus contests dichotomised accounts of social movements that oppose losses to victories, cooptation to resistance, and movements to institutions. Instead, we call for situated and dynamic accounts of insurgent practice, capable of theorising the long, messy, co-constituted evolution of political contexts and popular struggle.R esum e: Cet article examine comment des campagnes populaires pour le logement des d emunis a New York et a Chicago ont r eussi a engager l'Etat et des institutions financi eres locales dans la cr eation de community land trusts. Dans la trajectoire de leurs luttes, victoires et pertes se sont construites les unes des autres, ni aussi permanentes qu'elles semblaient au d epart. Les campagnes ont jou e de mani ere it erative sur des espaces de «citoyennet e invit ee» (tribunaux, mairie) et des espaces «invent es» d'action collective (squats). Elles ont trouv e leur plus grand succ es lorsque, exploitant l'incapacit e de l' Etat a d efendre des propri et es abandonn ees, elles ont suscit e une certaine complicit e des gouvernements locaux dans leurs prises de contrôle des terrains. L'article conteste donc les r ecits dichotomiques de mouvements sociaux opposant les pertes aux victoires, la cooptation a la r esistance, et les mouvements aux institutions. Au lieu de cela, nous favorisons des comptes rendus contextualis es et dynamiques de la pratique des «insurg es», cherchant a th eoriser l' evolution longue, nuanc ee et co-constitu ee des contextes politiques et de la lutte populaire.Every decade, housing for low-income people in the United States becomes more precarious, amplified by the threat of eviction, homelessness and a disappearing subsidised housing stock. As we go well beyond a crisis point, housing activism appears to be reviving as are municipal government responses that draw much on local context and history. In 2017, after over a decade of activism, Picture the
