Metropolitics

Using Cross-Class Politics to Challenge Urban Housing Inequality in Islamabad, Pakistan

Hafsah Siddiqui — 2025-04-01T05:00:00Z

When redevelopment schemes target a city's poor for removal to provide opportunities for the privileged, how can poor residents assert a right to their home? With Islamabad as a case study, Hafsah Siddiqui shows how cross-class politics can be the basis for collaborative efforts for the poor to maintain a right to the city.
---- Series: Horizons in the Housing Struggle Islamabad is touted as Pakistan's loveliest city, with lush greenery and clean public spaces. The slogan “Islamabad the

- Essays / Global South, Asia, Pakistan, Islamabad, housing, right to housing, informal housing, urban services, social class, mobilization, urban inequality

Life, Loss, and Cooperative Housing in New York

Christian Anderson — 2025-03-11T06:00:00Z

What forms of urban living, sociality, and security are enabled by social housing? At once memoir and counter-history, Just City offers an evocative answer to this question based on experiences growing up in collective housing in 1970s New York.
At a moment when selective nostalgia is being channeled to potent political effect, Just City: Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right offers a compelling counterpoint. The book is a memoir detailing the author's upbringing in

- Reviews / housing, right to housing, affordable housing, cooperative housing, public housing, social housing, sociality, urbanity, New York, Upper West Side, Manhattan

Dusting off the Archives: Connecting Historical Renters' Activism to Contemporary Housing-Justice Efforts

Céline Drieskens — 2025-03-05T06:00:00Z

Drawing parallels between the first renters' union in Brussels and the contemporary efforts of WUUNE, a newly formed independent renters' union, this essay advocates for community archives as one (of many) tools in the pursuit of housing justice.
---- Series: Horizons in the Housing Struggle It is February 29, 2024, when I first ring the doorbell of Albert Martens' home in Schaerbeek, Brussels. The 84-year-old housing activist and sociologist invites me into his attic office, in the house he

- From the Field / housing, right to housing, right to the city, housing justice, community organizing, tenants, archives, Belgium, Brussels

Horizons in the Housing Struggle

Jaime Jover & Kristen Hackett — 2025-02-14T06:00:00Z

We are living through a polycrisis, a multidimensional, interlinked series of capitalism's structural problems emerging worldwide. Unfolding genocides, wars and armed conflicts, Western democratic models in crisis and fascism on the rise, labor struggles increasing, climate change and related disasters growing, and the looming environmental collapse… The list is long and illustrates the ongoing and irresoluble conflict between capital and life. Even though it might not have attracted much

- Series / housing, right to housing, affordable housing, housing crisis, housing policy, housing justice, public housing, rental housing, social housing

A Global Right-to-Housing Movement Versus Financialization

Jaime Jover — 2021-06-23T15:38:01Z

Financialization enables a wealthy transnational class to accumulate capital through land, enhances inequalities through housing, and denies and deprives human rights. Housing activists must articulate an internationalist response to this global conflict, setting aside political and cultural differences and looking beyond the local scale of every housing conflict.
In February 2021, the Gittell Collective at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) hosted a workshop on

- Essays / affordable housing, housing, real estate, right to housing, housing crisis, housing justice, financialization

The Financialization of Rent-Regulated Housing in New York City after Rent Reform

Benjamin F. Teresa — 2020-12-04T06:00:00Z

In New York City, rent-controlled housing stock has been progressively deregulated over the last three decades, to the point where it is now wholly in the hands of financial investors. In this paper, Benjamin Teresa analyzes how tenants' associations have been fighting back against these landlords, who have let housing fall into disrepair while simultaneously hiking rents.
---- Series: Cities in the Age of Financialization In June of 2019, the New York State legislature stunned the

- From the Field / housing, right to housing, financialization, rent control, rent, tenants, New York, United States, activism, urban knowledge, public policy, housing policy

Social housing in Europe: the end of an era?

Noémie Houard & translated by Oliver Waine — 2012-09-26T04:55:00Z

Although there is no single European model for social housing, there are nevertheless a number of common trends and features in most countries in Europe: delegation to local government, a new focus on fragile populations, reductions in the proportion of social housing. In France, the welfare state is tending to break with its “universalist” vocation in order to target action on increasingly vulnerable populations.
Most works and studies concerning social housing in Europe stress the diversity

- Debates / Europe, decentralization, social diversity, social housing, welfare state, right to housing