Introducing the Radical Housing Journal
RHJ Editorial Collective
Issue 1.1 // April 2019
“Post-2008” as a field of action and inquiry in uneven housing justice struggles
The first issue of the Radical Housing Journal focuses on practices and theories of organizing as connected to post-2008 housing struggles. As 2008 was the dawn of the subprime mortgage and financial crisis, and as the RHJ coalesced ten years later in its aftermath, we found this framing apropos. The 2008 crisis was, after all, a global event, constitutive of new routes and formations of global capital that in turn impacted cities, suburbs, and rural spaces alike in highly uneven, though often detrimental, ways. Attentive to this, we hoped to think through its globality and translocality by foregrounding “post-2008” as field of inquiry. What new modes of knowledge pertinent to the task of housing justice organizing could be gained by thinking 2008 through an array of geographies, producing new geographies of theory?
EDITORIALS
THE LONG READ
Liquid Tenancy
"Post-crisis" economies of displacement, community organizing, and new forms of resistance
Joshua Akers, Eric Seymour, Diné Butler, and Wade Rathke
The Land Is Ours
Vulnerabilization and resistance in informal settlements in Puerto Rico: Lessons from the Caño Martín Peña Community Land Trust
Line Algoed and María E. Hernández Torrales
Benevolent Evictions and Cooperative Housing Models in Post-Ondoy Manila
Maria Khristine Alvarez
RETROSPECTIVES
Toward a Politics of Accountability
Feminist ethics of care and whiteness in Detroit's foreclosure crisis
Rachael Baker
Philippine Housing Takeover
How the urban poor claimed their right to shelter
Hazel M. Dizon
The Struggles for the Right to the City Across Spatial Scales
Experiences from Grand Belleville in Paris
Quentin Ramond and Claudio Pulgar
Imali Nolwazi (“We Need Money and Knowledge”)
A rallying cry from the South African Homeless Peoples Federation
Salma Ismail
Occupy, Resist, Construct, Dwell!
A Genealogy of Urban Occupation Movements in Central São Paulo
Jeroen Stevens
CONVERSATIONS
The “Caravana pelo Direito à Habitação”
Towards a new movement for housing in Portugal?
Roberto Falanga, Simone Tulumello, Andy Inch, Ana Rita Alves, Sílvia Jorge, Jannis Kühne, and Rita Silva
Imploding Activism
Challenges and possibilities of housing scholar-activism
Pratichi Chatterjee, Jenna Condie, Alistair Sisson and Laura Wynne
UPDATES
What Makes a Good Tenant?
Squatters and migrants resisting housing discrimination in Warsaw
Kamil Kuhr
When “Just Right” Is Not Right
Pushing back against austerity in Toronto
Mehedi Khan and Douglas Young
Escaping the Parasite of the Student Flat
Reflections on an experiment in co-operative housing
Hamish Kallin and Mike Shaw