Contemporary Struggles for Housing Justice

Most medium and large-size cities have been experiencing an acute housing crisis since, at least, the 2008 great financial crisis, although questions about housing injustice have much longer and deeper historical roots since the dawn of capitalism. The features of housing injustice span from classical issues of unaffordability, discrimination, poor construction and maintenance, overcrowding, and segregated urban location to increasingly cries about home evictions and forcible displacement, homelessness, unsustainable indebtedness of homeowners, unprecedented global real estate speculation, tax benefits for luxury (and largely vacant) homes, landlords harassing tenants, overpriced and short-term rentals, the decline or privatisation of social housing, and racialised and gendered social reproduction in home-making, to name a few. Housing scholars in general and sociologists in particular have rightly paid attention to many of these phenomena, but research on contemporary grassroots struggles for housing justice has enjoyed less relevance in mainstream publications, conferences, funding and teaching. This presentation aims at offering an account of studies focused on recent housing movements, protests and organising, mostly from Spain and Europe. I will argue that key concepts from what I designate a ‘sociological political economy of housing activism’ framework help analysing the contentious processes in which activists, their opponents and third parties are involved. In particular, ‘sociospatial and sociotemporal structures of opportunities and constraints’ of housing struggles and their ‘multi-dimensional outcomes’ have fruitfully contributed to my analyses of squatting, anti-eviction and tenants’ movements. I will thus present my findings on these movements by recalling the importance of appropriate theoretical interpretations.