Editorial on ‘Tenants organizing: precarization and resistance’ (original) (raw)
Related papers
Tenants organizing: precarization and resistance
Radical Housing Journal, 2021
Special issue introduction. Tenants’ mobilizations are covered unevenly in research and few attempts connect tenants’ mobilizations as transnational or globally linked phenomena, despite the clear connections between national tenants’ associations and international links between tenants’ organizations (i.e. International Union of Tenants, or the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City) (see also Stringer 2019). Moreover, tenants’ mobilizations and movements often stand in the shadow of more spectacular mobilizations and movements and are rarely depicted by researchers, however often richly documented by movement historians. There is also a tendency to study tenants’ collective actions in retrospect and there are some significant contributions to this body of literature presented by historians and historical sociologists (Bradley 2014; Chisholm, 2016; Gray 2018a; Gold 2014; Mattern 2018; Rolf 2020). A few recent works, published mostly in the last decade, focus on contemporary struggles of tenants (Brickell et al. 2017; di Feliciantonio 2017; Flesher Fominaya 2015; Gustafsson et al. 2019; Huron 2018, Listerborn et al. 2020; Martínez López 2019; Polanska 2015; 2017; Polanska & Richard 2019; Thörn 2020) exposing the inequalities and exploitation of the current urban capitalist development.
Driven From Below: A Look at Tenant Organizing and the New Gentrification.
Perspectives Journal, 2009
This essay is the beginning of an attempt to combine theory and practice for radical organizers and activists working to combat gentrification and displacement in cities across the United States. Based on the premise that all real change has to be driven by those most affected by injustice, it takes a detailed look at some of the practical challenges involved in tenant organizing, and the building of long-lived and sustainable structures for horizontal organization and direct democracy. This organizing work is understood to be situated within a framework of neoliberalism and globalization that are the ultimate causes of gentrification and displacement in the inner city.
Housing, Theory and Society, 2024
This paper analyses how tenants' organizations approach the state for "post-neoliberal housing policy" that challenges decades of neoliberal housing governance. It introduces the concept of "counter-hegemonic legislative strategies" to illustrate how tenants' movements in Spain have achieved this policy shift by influencing legislative changes. In contrast to traditional lobbying or representation-focused movements, unions aim to organize tenants offensively against the commodification of housing and capitalist relations, positioning themselves as counter-hegemonic forces. The paper outlines three mechanisms used to achieve this: turning tenant evictions and landlord threats into acts of civil disobedience; using the media strategically to shape narratives; and exploiting institutional windows of opportunity through alliances and political crises. While the legislative victories gained by these unions may fall short of their full demands, the paper emphasizes that their impact goes beyond political outcomes. Their activities contribute to contesting neoliberal housing trajectories, disrupting hegemonic governance, and reshaping the political landscape.
Rowman & Littlefield, 2018
With the decimation of social housing and the resurgence of a profoundly exploitative private housing market, the contemporary political economy of housing now shares many distressing features with the situation one hundred years ago. Starting with a re-appraisal of the Rent Strikes, Rent and Its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggles asks what housing campaigners can learn from a proven organisational victory for the working class. A series of investigative accounts from scholar-activists and housing campaign groups across the UK charts the diverse aims, tactics and strategies of current urban resistance, seeking to make a vital contribution to the contemporary housing question in a time of crisis. My Introduction to the book is available here: https://ws1.nbni.co.uk/widgets/page/5b8cfb86f5ba7407e8544359/0
A union for tenants: Tenant militancy in Gothenburg as a historical example
Radical Housing Journal, 2021
The Swedish Union of Tenants is known today as perhaps the strongest tenants' organisation in the world, with an established institutional role in the rent-setting system and a mandate to collectively bargain rents. What is relatively unknown, however, is that this system emerged out of a period of widespread rent struggle during the mid-war period. This was especially noteworthy in the city of Gothenburg. During the 19th Century, Gothenburg had become an important industrial centre and its population multiplied tenfold. Together with other groups, such as clerks and small shop owners, the workers formed a distinct popular class culture with organisational expressions and collective mobilisation that changed the social and political order of the city forever. One of these expressions was the tenants' unions, seen as a sort of trade unions for the rented home. Tenants' unions advocated protective legislation for tenants and confronted landlords, both with legal means and with militant methods such as rent strikes and blockades. This militancy reached its highest levels from 1932 to 1937. The collective mobilisation and organisation of the tenants altered the power relations between landlords and tenants, which can be seen both in the concessions made by landlords in numerous conflicts and in the fact that the landlords altered their organisations to defend themselves against the tenant offensive. By the time of the rent control act of 1942, centralised collective bargaining had been largely implemented and the collective organisations had become established and recognised interest organisations. The historical relationship between organised labour and tenants, and the effect of tenant organising on the rental market, are still under-researched subjects. This article is intended to both explore the historic rise of the tenants' movement and to show the very real historical conflict between independent grassroot organisations and political parties in housing and labour history.
Contested Cities and Urban Activism, 2019
The squatters’ movement first appeared in Spain in the 1980s. However, in 2006, a new and differentiated social movement emerged: the pro-housing movement. This movement organized young people from all over the country and therefore consolidated hundreds of platforms of people of different ages affected by foreclosures. Their proposals and demands have meant a roadmap for the 15M movement. The purpose of this article is to compare two current urban movements involved in noteworthy social battles inside Spain on subjects such as access to housing and spaces for communal sociability. Both the squatters’ movement and housing activism display similarities and confluences, though they stand as two different movements not only in their development and organizational processes, but also in their goals and leadership. Squatting and housing are two different kinds of urban activism that emerged in Spain as a response to the neoliberal urban-renewal regimes and the lack of housing policies. The differences between these two forms of activism will appear in their tactics, identities and political orientations. Thus, the comparison will be useful to characterize two different but complementary forms of contemporary urban activism when faced with urban neoliberalism. Throughout the different cycles, the emergence of new movements destabilized the previously existing squatters’ practices and then translated them into new forms of activism.
2022
In recent years, there has been a steady rise in homelessness in almost all EU countries, while forced evictions have increased in frequency, in number, and in violence throughout the world. The main housing and policy agendas have tended to rely upon the creation of market-based housing finance models, and on the commodification and financialisation of housing, with states withdrawing from direct housing production. This doctoral thesis investigates these phenomena by analysing council housing occupations and evictions from council housing in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. Based on a 15-month study, realised in close engagement with the Habita social movement association, it combines various approaches, involving multisited, engaged ethnography, policy analysis, and theoretical and historical inquiry. The primary objective of the thesis is to understand the reasons for and consequences of occupations, analysing them as an experience pertaining to the everyday sphere of housing exclusions. It examines the current forms of governance of council estates, investigating the extent to which they promote housing inclusions. It explores the notion of occupations and evictions as practices of city-making, inquiring whether and how occupations could potentially (re)produce new forms of urban citizenship that could challenge the dominant capitalist and neoliberal forms of production of urban space. The study looks into the agency and subjectivities of three groups of actors involved with social housing occupations and evictions: municipal employees, social movement activists, and women who occupy to contest their housing exclusion. The analysis reveals gendered forms of subalternisation, which are also at times actively produced by the state agents. The invited forms of participation in processes of urban governance do not allow for substantial participation in housing issues, which necessitates resorting to transgressive practices. Occupations can be perceived as a transgressive form of participation that marginalised urban dwellers opt for in the case of acute and intense housing exclusion. In this sense, strong similarities in the contexts of the Global South and Global North can be identified. Engagement with social movement actors emerges as a valuable tool for contesting the framings of homelessness as a personal failure, promoting the socialisation of activism for housing rights instead. The thesis concludes by indicating that occupations have a high potential capacity to challenge housing exclusions and to contribute to transformation, yet this capacity is undermined by the stigmatisation they face due to their radical and transgressive character.
Politics, power, and precarity: how tenant organizations transform local political life
Interest Groups & Advocacy, 2022
As the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated housing precarity, tenant organizations grew in numbers and salience. But membership-based tenant organizations predated the pandemic and will persist beyond it. There are (at least) hundreds of them in localities across the country. Many aim to advance sweeping change. In doing so, they face formidable tasks: politically organizing in race-class subjugated communities, working in opposition to powerful actors (corporate landlords, property managers, etc.), and navigating complex and sometimes hostile local political institutions (city councils, mayors, rent boards, etc.). How do these organizations build power and effect change in the face of such obstacles? Drawing on a rich body of original qualitative evidence (participant observation and in-depth interviews), this paper explores the politics of local tenant organizations. We assess the origins of such organizations, how they are structured, and how they pursue political change. In doing so, we offer a rich descriptive account of phenomena that have largely escaped the attention of political scientists. We find that tenant organizations can cultivate radically different ways of conceptualizing political economy, carve out a distinctive political focus on race-class subjugated communities, and create critical opportunities for otherwise marginalized actors to develop and exercise political power.
Tenant Participation, Social Housing and Democracy: Tensions between expectations and realities
HousingWORKS - March 2013 (draft only)
Dr Dallas Rogers summarises themes from the Annual Marg Barry Memorial Lecture 2012, as presented by himself at Redfern Town Hall in December 2012. Long before the government and nongovernment housing providers created formal tenant participation strategies, the residents of low income households were creating their own more informal participation processes to advocate for better housing outcomes. However, from the early 2000s, two key changes have altered how tenants might participate in the governance of their housing. The first change was the move from public housing provided by a state housing authority toward a model of social housing provision delivered by the community housing sector. The second was a move to formalise tenant participation as a set of policies and practices within the government and then the non-government housing sectors. We can think about the newer, more formalised, tenant participation processes and the older resident action groups as two distinct types of tenant participation. The newer type is the one that we now commonly associate with tenant participation, and includes processes such as tenant consultations, tenant committees, tenant advisory groups and the like. The second type is a much older form of tenant participation that involves tenant-driven community organising. There is a need for both types of tenant participation because tenants can advocate for a broader range of outcomes through more informal tenant organising efforts than can be achieve through the formalised tenant participation processes set up by housing mangers alone. By focusing in on this distinction, this article highlights three key tensions that arise when tenants enter their housing managers’ formalised tenant participation processes and then the democratic realities of these processes fall short of their expectations. It is local level democracy that is at stake within tenant participation