No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
The current crisis of housing affordability in urban environments has drawn the attention of geographers to housing commons. This paper provides a conceptual and operational framework for an empirical study of housing commons. In thinking about the commons as a ‘relational triad’ involving a resource (the object), and community (the actors) and a form of organisation (the activity), I argue that housing commons are hybrid, imperfect social processes that escape binary scrutiny. Drawing on the findings of a research project that took place between 2017 and 2021, I focus on an emerging form of self-managed cooperative housing in the city of Barcelona, known as the ‘grant of use model’. I dwell on the contradictory nature of self-management in the context of a social reproduction crisis. Housing commons can be conducive to solidaristic communities and non-individualist subjectivities outside the financialisation of everyday life via mortgaged homeownership. However, the time and emotional investment required to self-develop housing projects in highly regulated, neoliberal urban spaces are not available for everyone. Housing commons require a favourable political context, economic resources, social connections and technical knowledge, which prevent democratic access. I analyse the origin and causes of exclusionary boundaries surrounding these housing commons to understand how these boundaries can be softened. Departing from disembedded conceptualisations of the commons, I show what type of public-common partnerships and innovative policies can make housing commons more inclusive without renouncing principles such as self-organisation and autonomy.
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.