Archiving the Housing Conjuncture
Judith Keller, Erin McElroy, Samantha Thompson and Ana Vilenica
CURRENT ISSUE
Issue 6.2 // October 2024
Archiving the Housing Conjuncture
The past months have continued to exacerbate crises of housing, home, displacement, dispossession, and other state-sanctioned forms of violence and premature death. We witness erasure of histories, lives lived, belongings, and homes, which are intentional strategies to forcibly remove people from place and to make it seem as though they were never there. The authors thus document this conjunctural moment in radical housing struggles and collectively analyze and interpret the current political, economic, and social conditions, not for the sake of the analysis itself, but to inform strategies for action. This documentation encourages us to reflect on the role and value of archives in radical housing organizing. We define radical housing archiving as a collective intervention strategy responsive to the immediate housing crises built upon care for just housing futures. In this editorial, we aim to situate the archive while considering its possibilities for housing movements and radical care.
doi.org/10.54825/HWAJ6919
Cover image: Ana Vilenica
Cover design: Felicia Berryessa-Erich
EDITORIAL
THE LONG READ
Beyond the right to stay put
Fighting for housing remunicipalization in Chinatown, Los Angeles
Mathilde Lind Gustavussen
Fostering long-term conviviality for refugees in the city
Inclusive, collaborative housing in Vienna
Caroline Birkner
The party in the flats
Relationships between housing movements and the political party form in the 1970s Irish rent strikes
Fiadh Tubridy and John Bohan
‘This is not a ghetto’
Residents' resistance and re-negotiation of neighbourhood narratives
Rebecka Söderberg
Migrant housing struggle and racial discrimination
The case of postsocialist Leipzig and Riga
Harriet Allsopp, Giovanna Astolfo, Annegret Haase, Karlis Laksevics, Anika Schmidt, Bahanur Nasya and Ayesha Khalil
CONVERSATION SERIES
Pursuing Tenant International: Learning from struggles for home in Abya-Yala, edited by Ana Vilenica (Part III)
The conversation series ‘Pursuing Tenant International: Learning from struggles for home in Abya-Yala,’ starts from a premise that there is a decentralized Tenant International in the making across different geographies, despite and against forced internationalism, a complex landscape of housing dispossession and abandonment involving various actors, including states, transnational corporations, and non-profit organizations that collaborate across borders to profit from our homes. This conversation series utilizes the Radical Housing Journal as a nod to this movement and builds on the idea that conversations can serve as tools for fostering relationships between tenants, organizers, activists, artists, and thinkers in cross-border struggles. This series, spanning several issues of the Radical Housing Journal, features multiple conversations with base leaders, organizers, and intellectuals involved in local struggles throughout the Americas, also referred to by its Indigenous name Abya-Yala. Part II can be found here. These conversations will provide readers with valuable insight into tactics and strategies used by different groups to enrich local and cross-border solidarity, strengthen opposition to dispossession, and construct alternatives here and now. These conversations also touch on a wide range of perspectives relating to territories and lands—including those domestic (related to home), communal, Indigenous, Black, and internationalist—where resistance has inspired movements for new housing futures.
Crisis of housing cooperatives in Mexico City:
A struggle for Palo Alto
Luis Márquez Cruz, Fabiola Carrera, Ana Vilenica and Pedro Montes de Oca
Latin American networking and cooperative struggles in Argentina:
A conversation with the Movimiento de Ocupantes e Inquilinos (MOI)
Néstor Jeifetz, Ana Vilenica and Moisés Quiroz
Accompanying popular organizations through grassroots planning in Argentina:
A conversation with El Taller Libre de Proyecto Social (TLPS)
Beatriz Pedro, Ana Vilenica and Moisés Quiroz
Struggles of vehicle residents in Squamish:
Challenging the capitalist and colonial institution of housing
Thomasina Pidgeon and Ana Vilenica
Cooperativism as pedagogy
Conversation with Gustavo Machado a lecturer and researcher from the Facultad de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad de la República
Gustavo Machado, Ana Vilenica and Moisés Quiroz
It’s not about building houses; it’s about building people’s power:
Conversation with Carmen and Andrea from the Movimiento Territorial de Liberación (MTL) Buenos Aires
Carmen and Andrea of the Movimiento Territorial de Liberación (MTL) in Buenos Aires, Ana Vilenica and Moisés Quiroz
Norita is the first of many self-managed community neighbourhoods to come:
A conversation with organizers and residents of Barrio Comunitario Norita Cortiñas in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area (Part I)
Organizers and residents of Barrio Comunitario Norita Cortiñas in Buenos Aires metropolitan area, with Ana Vilenica and Moisés Quiroz
Norita is the first of many self-managed community neighbourhoods to come:
A conversation with organizers and residents of Barrio Comunitario Norita Cortiñas in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area (Part 2)
Organizers and residents of Barrio Comunitario Norita Cortiñas in Buenos Aires metropolitan area, with Ana Vilenica and Moisés Quiroz
CONVERSATIONS
Rent controls in comparative perspective:
Reflections on an international symposium
Hamish Kallin and Neil Gray, with Joe Beswick, Damian Dempsey, Siobhan Donnachie, Tommy Gavin, Jennie Gustafsson, Konstantin Kholodilin, Oksana Mironova, Edna Monroy, Jaime Palomera, Maria Persdotter, Ana Vilenica and Maria Wallstam
Single Mothers Association of Kenya (SMAK) and the Fight to Stay Put on the Ziwani Estate in Nairobi
Daniel Manyasi, Loretta Lees and Ashley West
