Collective Organizing for Dwelling Against Displacement and Peripheralization

Displacement is much more than the singular event of loss of home. As a logic of urbanization, displacement is inseparable from historical and contemporary forms of dispossession and subjectivation of poor and marginalized dwellers through disavowal and stigma. Ongoing displacement and peripheralization of individuals, households and entire communities have deep roots in social, cultural, legal and political processes that produce certain subjects as disposable – and, by extension, displaceable – along local, national, and transnational logics. How can collective organizing for housing justice acknowledge such logics, and recentre their efforts on situated and intersectional understandings? Building on a multifaceted framing of displacement, it is clear that demands for making home in place – dwelling, in its expanded sense – can be denigrated even when communities remain ‘in place’ or are offered shelter. Organizing for dwelling against displacement would therefore involve reclaiming simultaneously emplacement and dignity. In this presentation I want to discussion the intersection of displacement, inhabitation and dignity through the formulation of collective housing organising in places that are peripheralized by dominant urban and housing practices and discourses. I will draw on ongoing work about strategies for alternatives to urban displacement in peripheral and core areas of Southern European cities, to offer insights into forms of resistance to state withdrawal, privatisation, undemocratic decision-making and limited institutional accountability, and into efforts for extending new models for intervening and reclaiming dignified homes against processes of othering.