Editorial on ‘Tenants organizing: precarization and resistance’

Keywords: tenants’ movements, housing, neoliberalization, resistance

In 2019 we organized a conference casting light on the housing crisis and especially on the historical and contemporary organization of tenants to contest housing inequalities. By placing housing struggles and tenants’ organization at the centre of the debate we aimed at exposing and politicizing current capitalist development and, hopefully, at proposing a different view of how housing can be organized and imagined by discussing how resistance can be used, with what effects and how it can be connected to other struggles. This special issue is a result of this conference dealing with tenants’ organization in different contexts examining how tenants organize(d), why and what could be learned from it. In this introducing text we give an overview of this field of research by asking why tenants’ mobilizations are important to study, what is still under-studied in the field and which perspectives are important to raise in future research.

https://doi.org/10.54825/SVNC5702

Dominika V. Polanska is an associate professor of sociology interested in urban social movements, extra-parliamentary activism, squatting, tenants’ mobilizations, informal organization, and non-traditional forms of civic engagement. She is affiliated with Södertörn University, and Uppsala University and the Institute for Housing and Urban Research.

Hannes Rolf is a postdoc researcher, affiliated with the Instititute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University and with the Center for Civil Society Research at Ersta Sköndal Bräcke University College. His main research area is the study of historical social movements and interest organisations of the housing market.

Scott Springfeldt is an independent researcher from Stockholm with a background in social anthropology just as well as the Stockholm housing justice movements and various right to the city initiatives. Recently, he has worked on mapping neighbourhood privatizations in Stockholm and new forms of digital labour in India.

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