The renewed ‘crisis’:
Housing struggle before and after the pandemic
Edited by Alejandra Reyes, Ana Vilenica, Claire Bowman, Elana Eden, Erin McElroy and Michele Lancione
CURRENT ISSUE
Issue 2.1 // May 2020
The renewed ‘crisis’: Housing struggle before and after the pandemic
Issue 2.1 is launching in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. After taking time to acknowledge the rupture caused by this unprecedented situation, we decided to go forward with this issue as a way of joining the urgent discussion about the present and future of housing organizing. With this issue, we bring past experiences of struggle into the present as a basis for rethinking the housing doomsday machine that we got stuck with while trying to handle the pandemic and disastrous national quarantine management. Together with articles that reflect on the past experiences of housing struggles, we also opened this issue up for collective reflections about the present and the post-pandemic futures of housing and home.
EDITORIAL
EDITORS’ PAPER
THE LONG READ
Spatial manifestations of collective refugee housing
The case of City Plaza
Eleni Katrini
Looking ‘for a fight rather than a cause’
(De)legitimization of resistance to gentrification in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Margaret Ellis-Young
Gentrification and vigilantism in Milan’s Central train Station
Manuel Mireanu
Housing, the hyper-precarization of asylum seekers and the contested politics of welcome on Tyneside
Kathryn Cassidy
Claiming the right to dignity:
New organizations for housing justice in neoliberal Sweden
Carina Listerborn, Irene Molina and Åse Richard
CONVERSATIONS
Building territories to protect life and not profit. The RHJ in conversation with Raquel Rolnik
Michele Lancione and Raquel Rolnik
Housing struggles in Romania and in Central Eastern Europe (CEE)
Michele Lancione and Erin McElroy in conversation with George Zamfir, Eniko Vincze, Veda Popovici and Ioana Florea
UPDATES
Towards justice:
A communiqué from Los Angeles
Ananya Roy, Hannah Appel and Hilary Malson
Every renter needs a tenants union
Aimee Inglis
Every house a sanctuary
Fighting displacement on all fronts in Sunset Park, Brooklyn
Joshua Mullenite
Reporting from Greece
Tonia Katerini for Stop Auctions Athens
ASLIDO
Association of People for Homes, Czech Republic
Asociace lidí pro domov, z.s.
‘Stay Home Without a Home’:
Report from a webinar on the right to housing
Guya Accornero, Mona Harb, Alex F. Magalhães, Felipe G. Santos, Giovanni Semi, Samuel Stein and Simone Tulumello
Book review of ‘Doorways:
Women, Homelessness, Trauma and Resistance' by Bekki Perriman
Rowan Tallis-Milligan
Film review of ‘PUSH’
A documentary by Fredrik Gertten
Caterina Sartori