Squatters houses, eviction and the struggle to stay in the city

In recent years, activists, scholars, planners and officials from government and international organizations have begun to employ the concept of the right to the city in their research and work. This has led to many different appropriations of its meaning and diverse objectives. Yet, despite its broad application and multiple meanings, the right to the city remains part of a radical, transformative ideology, one that challenges the organizing power of capitalism and its effects on historically marginalized urban spaces and communities.  

This research examines the right to the city movement in Buenos Aires, through an analysis of squatter households awaiting eviction from five informal hotels and the social organization that represents them through legal and social forms of resistance.  Access to decent and stable housing conditions is a basic need, yet current urban economic and demographic transformations are pushing the poor and lower middle classes to resort to informal housing and precarious alternatives in order to stay in the city.  Many social organizations that espouse the right to the city slogan promote community access to housing, city resources and space through a rights based discourse that resists the marginalizing logic of urban neoliberal regimes.  Based primarily on participant observation and informal interviews, my research explores the difficulties of developing a resistance movement based on the radical and transformative tenets of a right to the city discourse, while attempting to address the immediate needs and daily struggles of communities living in precarious housing situations.