Call for papers: New special issue of the RHJ

Radical Housing and Environmental Struggles

To date, the Radical Housing Journal has published texts related to the manifold economic, social and political crises of/in housing. This call for papers proposes a special issue that will open up research, debate and discussion on what radical housing means in times of environmental and climate crises. We speak of radical housing in this context because we approach housing as a fundamentally political question “inseparable from implicated, everyday practices of inhabiting space and challenging the forces that make the world unhomely and uninhabitable” (About the RHJ, 2018). This includes struggles over access to livable environments and questions of climate and environmental (in)justices.

We welcome papers for peer review as well as conversations, reflections and updates from scholar-activists, activists and artists working on questions at the intersection of radical housing and struggles over/for the environment. Texts may engage with the following broad questions (as well as others):

  • How can a radical housing lens shift our understanding of nature, space, and belonging/home while the very spaces we inhabit are rendered precarious by climate and environmental crises?
  • How do we understand housing insecurity and socio-environmental vulnerability in relation to the climate and environmental crises?
  • How are climate change and other human-caused environmental degradation – and the responses to them – affecting housing injustices?
  • What does it mean to consider housing struggles and environmental crises as deeply intertwined, instead of two separate issues?
  • What are the discourses and materialities of radical housing in times of climate change?

We also welcome texts that critically unpack the following concepts in relation to radical housing and struggles over/for the environment:

  • Climate apartheid (Long et al., 2021)
  • Maintenance and repair (Knuth, 2019; García-Lamarca, 2025)
  • Situated knowledge and practices (Moretti et al., 2024)
  • Sufficiency and housing distribution (Gough et al., 2024)
  • Tenure and property rights (Wagner et al., 2025)
  • Environmental privilege and green gentrification (Anguelovski et al., 2022)
  • Climate finance and insurance (Elliot, 2021, Kear et al., 2025)
  • Climate justice, housing and informality (Cociña and Landesman, 2025)
  • Climate and housing rights violations (Schechla et al., 2021)
  • Transformative adaptation (Anguelovski et al., 2016)

Timeline
We kindly ask for the working title of your paper and a 500 word abstract by 1 October, 2025 to be sent to collective@radicalhousingjournal.org, specifying the type of contribution you aim to submit (peer-reviewed article, conversation or update). Selection notifications will be sent out in mid-October, and if selected, we expect the first full draft of the contribution by 1 February, 2026. We aim to publish this special issue in November 2026.

Please refer to the RHJ submission guidelines, available at https://radicalhousingjournal.org/submissions/

References
Anguelovski, I., Connolly, JJT., Cole, H. et al. (2022) Green gentrification in European and North American cities. Nat Commun 13, 3816 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31572-1

Anguelovski, I., Shi, L., Chu, E., Gallagher, D., Goh, K., Lamb, Z., Reeve, K. & Teicher H (2016) Equity Impacts of Urban Land Use Planning for Climate Adaptation: Critical Perspectives from the Global North and South. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 36(3), 333–348. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X16645166

Cociña, C. & Landesman, T. (eds) (2025) Better cities are possible: transforming informal settlements on a warming planet. International Institute of Environment and Development, London. Available at https://www.iied.org/22613iied (accessed 27 June 2025)

Elliott, R. (2021) Underwater. Loss, flood insurance, and the moral economy of climate change in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press.

García-Lamarca, M. (2025) Urban political ecologies of housing decarbonisation: Towards radical housing repair. Progress in Human Geography. DOI 10.1177/03091325251358409

Gough, I., Horn, S., Rogers C, et al. (2024) Fair decarbonisation of housing in the UK: A sufficiency approach. London School of Economics. Available at: https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/CASE/_new/publications/abstract/?index=10808 (accessed 27 June 2024).

Kear, M., Ponder, CS.., & Hilbrandt, H. (2024). Making climate finance: toward everyday, historically informed, and reparative understandings. City, 29(1–2), 262–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2024.2400442

Knuth, S. (2019) Cities and planetary repair: The problem with climate retrofitting. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 51(2): 487–504.

Moretti, JA., Cavalcanti, ER., Brasil, AB., et al. (2024) Occupation of vacant buildings in central districts by social movements as a means to deal with climate change in an inclusive way: the cases of cities São Paulo and Natal. Environment and Urbanization 36(1): 33–52.

Rice, J., Long, J., & Levenda, A. (2021). Against climate apartheid: Confronting the persistent legacies of expendability for climate justice. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 5(2), 625-645. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848621999286

Schechla, J, Abdelkader, Y, Elaydi, H & Mansour Ismail, A. (2021) In Pursuit of Climate Justice: Housing and Land Rights Violations amid Environmental Hazards and Climate-change. Housing and Land Rights Network. Available at: https://www.hlrn.org/img/documents/Pursuit%20of%20Climate%20Justice.pdf

Wagner, J., Kear, M., Knuth, S., et al. (2024) Grappling with real property supremacy in US urban climate finance. City. DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2024.2367922. 1-22.