Habitat International Coalition

Networked practices, knowledges and pedagogies for translocal housing activism

Adriana Allen, Camila Cociña and Julia Wesely

Published in Issue 2.2 // Conversations

Keywords: Networks, habitat rights, translocal activism, epistemic justice, knowledge co-production

Abstract:

How do global coalitions of civil society, non-governmental and community-based organisations, social movements and academics, make visible, defend and produce habitat rights? This conversation with the President of the Habitat International Coalition (HIC), Adriana Allen, examines HIC’s perspectives on the practices, knowledges and pedagogies for translocal housing activism through reflections structured along several themes. These include understanding the horizontal democratic practices of working as a ‘network of networks’, with particular focus on how translocality can go beyond international mobility. The discussion also addresses the struggle for recognition and for pursuing epistemic justice, highlighting caveats and potentials of knowledge co-production and popular pedagogies; and the diversity of understandings of housing (including, radical housing) which the Coalition nurtures and reconciles. The conversation highlights the value of foregrounding an explicitly rights-based housing agenda, which has been continuously nurtured over the past 40+ years of HIC’s work on the social production of habitat.

https://doi.org/10.54825/ZKPZ4893

Adriana Allen is the current President of the Habitat International Coalition (2019-2023). She is Professor of Development Planning and Urban Sustainability at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit at University College London as well as the Bartlett’s Vice-Dean International. Together with Aromar Revi, she co-leads a Work Package on “Multiplying Translocal Learning in Higher Education” in the Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW) programme.

Camila Cociña and Julia Wesely are Postdoctoral Research Fellows at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London, as part of the KNOW programme. Camila has been part of the RHJ Editorial Collective since 2017.

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