Housing justice, mobilization, and financialization: A conversation from the Antipode Institute for Geographies of Justice

Abstract

In June 2022, a group of activists, students, and scholars gathered in Barcelona for the 8th annual International Geographies of Justice Summer Institute (IGJ), Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, co-sponsored by Antipode and the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy. IGJ attendees included people from within movement and activist spaces, academics, and non-profit organizations who share the common vision of working toward housing justice. This article features a collective conversation that took place with IGJ attendees who participated in a public panel discussion attended by activists, community members, and people interested in hearing from local and international panelists about the state and direction of the housing justice movements in Glasgow, Berlin, New York, and Barcelona respectively. Thematically, the conversation held among IGJ attendees to produce the following manuscript focused on the broad and interconnected pillars of housing injustice that repeatedly arose in conversation throughout our time together in Barcelona, including financialization, activism and organizing, and housing justice movements broadly speaking.

Territorial subjectivities. The missing link between political subjectivity and territorialization

“…On a local scale, “being Kotti” solidifies emergent ties between neighbors and their allies. Beyond the local, it relates to struggles against eviction and organizing towards an expropriation and re-municipalization of corporate housing stock across scales, in Berlin and other cities around the world (Card, 2022; Coquelin et al, 2022; Vollmer and Gutiérrez, 2022).…”