Struggles for the decommodification of housing: the politics of housing cooperatives in Uruguay and Switzerland

Abstract

After the Global Financial Crisis, activists and scholars have turned to collective forms of housing as a strategy to decommodify housing. We argue that housing cooperatives might take a crucial role in this strategy. The fact that they are still marginal, however, raises questions about the conditions for their emergence, growth and survival. By bringing the trajectories of housing cooperatives in Switzerland and Uruguay in dialogue, we capture different paths towards housing policies conducive for cooperatives. In both countries, housing cooperatives are meaningful policy instruments to make urbanization governable. To understand their development, their mutual relations with governments are crucial. We argue that the organizational form of a cooperative resembles a shell, which can be repurposed from the inside and the outside. In their ambiguous position between self-organization and being entangled with state practices, the situated stories of housing cooperatives in Switzerland and Uruguay help to re-describe struggles to live and dwell in urbanizing spaces around the globe.

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