The Housing Question

Really interesting CFP (courtesy of crit-geog):

Call for Papers, Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting (AAG) 2012, New York, February 24^th – 28^th

The Housing Question Revisited

Session Organizers:

Henrik Gutzon Larsen (Aalborg University, Denmark)

Anders Lund Hansen (Lund University, Sweden)

Gordon MacLeod (Durham University, UK)

Tom Slater (University of Edinburgh, UK)

The year 2012 marks the 140^th anniversary of the publication of the article series by Friedrich Engels, which subsequently was published as the pamphlet The Housing Question.  Whilst less renowned than some of his other writings, the pamphlet has nonetheless proved highly influential to the work of numerous analysts of the urban process under capitalism, particularly in enabling a critical investigation of accumulation strategies, speculative landed developer interests, displacement dynamics, struggles over property rights, and the tension between use and exchange value with respect to urban land and housing.  Of course, for Engels, the housing question was never just about ‘housing’ per se, but about the injustices produced by the underlying structure of socio-political interests constituting capitalist urban land economies and policies, and the role of what he called ‘bourgeois socialists’ in reinforcing that structure.  Far from waning in the period since Engels was writing, the injustices he so clearly identified appear to have steadily expanded in scale and intensity, not least if we consider the contemporary urbanization of China, India, Africa and the ‘Middle East’ and ‘Far East’, and the massive displacement of working class people occurring in the name of economic growth, urban renaissance and modernization.  For example, in an influential essay in New Left Review in 2008, David Harvey draws on Engels’s pamphlet to make connections between the forms of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in 19th century Paris and mid-twentieth century New York and those taking place in cities like Mumbai and Shanghai today.  Harvey’s essay surely marks an important stepping-stone for further critical analyses, which could prove especially timely in light of the current global financial and economic crisis; one that was intricately intertwined with the housing question through the introduction of financial instruments and innovations in various sectors of housing.

In assessing the enduring relevance of Engels’s contribution, one crucial aim of this session to begin forging a conceptually rigorous approach towards locating the economic and political relations that shape a range of domiciliary forms – gentrification, slum developments, ghettos, condo verticality, gating, and suburbs in all their shapes (pristine, distressed etc) – which at times remain analytically separated in so much research.  In this spirit, we invite theoretically salient and empirically grounded contributions from scholars working on the following topics, where revisiting The Housing Question proves analytically and politically progressive:

-       Rethinking housing, ‘land’ and ‘property’

-       New modes of urbanization and habitat

-       Urban futures: ghettos, gatings, gentrifications, slums

-       Non-profit/social housing – what’s left?

-       Urban commons – what’s left?

-       Housing questions: justice/injustice

-       Urban revolutions: bourgeois and insurgent

-       Housing, land and the state

-       From financial looting to squatting

-       Values of use and exchange: excavating mobilities/Immobilities

Contributors are invited to submit a 250 word abstract by 16^th September to one or more of the organizers:

Henrik Gutzon Larsen (hgl@plan.aau.dk)

Anders Lund Hansen (anders.lund_hansen@keg.lu.se)

Gordon MacLeod (Gordon.MacLeod@durham.ac.uk)

Tom Slater (tom.slater@ed.ac.uk)

From Housing Crisis to Radical Urbanism: Reflections on Squatting

Over two weeks ago I posted a piece on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site which explored the coalition government’s plans to criminalize squatting subject to a brief consultation period. The main thrust of my argument was twofold:

1)    That plans to criminalize squatting would simply exacerbate a growing housing crisis in the UK. Squatting should be seen as a necessary coping strategy in the face of an highly uneven and exploitative housing market.

2)    That the proposed ban also betrays a more sinister logic that seeks to legislate against various struggles for social justice in our cities. The impact of a ban on the use of ‘occupation’ as a legitimate tactic of protest must therefore be carefully considered.

The piece was greeted by shrill jeremiads about the sanctity of private property. It was never my intention to romanticize squatting nor am I a ‘right-on’ academic hoping to secure some cheap activist points. I am a cultural and historical geographer who is working on a book-length project that explores the history of squatting in Berlin. The book is based on detailed archival and ethnographic research and is driven by a commitment to recovering the complex history behind various attempts to develop more just and equal spaces in our cities. To do so, also demands a fidelity to my source material and it was in such a spirit that I posted on CIF.

In the remainder of this post, I would like to respond in two ways to some of the more negative comments which I received. First, I would like to briefly explore the relationship between the law and squatting. Second, I would like to reflect on the nature of the current housing crisis in the UK and how squatting might prompt us to think differently about urban living. In a follow-up post, I will examine the complex historical geography of squatting in the UK and elsewhere and critically interrogate the relevance of squatting and other occupation-based practices within wider ‘right to the city’ struggles. For the sake of clarity, I have organized the rest of the post as follows:

1) The law and squatting

It is not surprising that the proposed new law has been deliberately constructed to defend the interests of “hard-working homeowners” against squatters. And yet, as Richard George rightly points out in an excellent piece in New Left Project, existing legal provisions already do a good job of protecting home-owners. George is also right to flag up the significance of Section 6 of the 1977 Criminal Law Act which protects occupants of a property from violent forcible entry by non-residents including owners. That a new law would give non-resident owners the same rights as displaced residential occupiers will only make matters worse. As George writes, “instead of bringing both parties before a judge, which gives tenants a chance to prove they’ve the right to be there, often-complex housing issues would be dealt with on the doorstep, further inflaming an already heated situation.”

It is hard, in this context, not to view the planned legislation as ideologically-driven and, as such, dependent on shoring up a commitment to the untouchable rightfulness of private property. I have more to say about this in a moment but I think it is important to insist on the sufficiency of existing legislation. What concerns me here is the potential use of the law as a ‘tool’ or ‘weapon’ that could be used to defend the parlous state of housing in the UK. This kind of legal ‘revanchism’ is a very worrying development and has, in my view, become a defining feature of the neo-liberal city with its increasingly iniquitous set of geographies.

2) From Housing Crisis to Re-thinking Property

There is a pressing housing crisis in the UK. The evidential particulars of the current crisis have recently been set out to great effect by Stuart Hodkinson in a piece in Red Pepper. As Hodkinson points out, the current market has been effectively paralyzed by its own internal contradictions. Rates of repossession and homelessness are on the rise. A concomitant slump in house building completions has put further pressure on the private rental market. For example, rents have already risen by over 7.3% in London over the past year and average rents have topped £1000 for the first time. And all of this is to say nothing of the serious cuts to housing benefits and other frontline services and the impact that this will undoubtedly have on the existing crisis. At the same time, it would be misleading to simply reduce the current UK housing crisis to a catastrophic failure of the global finance system. Housing inequality, so Hodkinson argues, has always been a systemic feature of capitalism and the incessant ‘creative destruction’ of our cities has, in turn, been central to the expansion of capitalist accumulation. In Hodkinson’s own words, “[capitalism] continually condemns significant numbers of people to housing misery, and periodically blows up into a wider crisis.”

My own ongoing research in Berlin has, in this context, shown that there is in fact a direct relationship between economic crisis, housing precarity, and intensified squatting. Similar conclusions have also been drawn with respect to the history of housing crises in London, Paris, and elsewhere. It would seem to me that the criminalization of squatting would only give further support to a failed pro-market model of housing driven by profiteering and speculation. Alternative housing solutions are therefore needed – Hodkinson talks of a “cross-tenure approach”  – and the everyday practices of squatters might offer some possible ways of addressing the housing question. Squatting should perhaps be seen as a both a necessary protest against precarity and a constituent protest for alternative ways of living together in increasingly divided and unequal urban settings. It is time to challenge long-standing pieties about the virtues of private property and to think creatively about notions of collective property. This is not to suggest that squatting offers the only long-term solution to the housing crisis in the UK, but that it does offer an alternative and autonomous set of practices that may help us to rethink how we want to live in our cities and in so doing build a more radical and just urbanism.

Part 2 will look at the everyday histories and geographies of squatting in England and elsewhere and the relevance of occupation as a legitimate protest tactic. 

Luddites Conference: Podcast Available

Via Infinite Thought and available here. Looks really excellent!  Speakers: Peter Linebaugh, Anna Davin, Iain Boal, TJ Clark, Esther Leslie and Dave King.

The Luddites, without Condescension
A Conference on the 200th Anniversary 
of the Frame-breakers’ Uprising

In the Spring of 2011 Birkbeck will host a one-day conference to mark the 200th anniversary of the uprising of the handloom weavers in the dawn of the industrial revolution under the command of the mythic General Ludd. Even though the movement was sparked by skilled artisans, “luddite” has ever since been a byword for technophobes facing backwards and mindless rejection of progress. The conference will gather historians of luddism and others interested in what in 1800 was called “the machinery question”, to consider not only the historical luddites, urban and rural, but also contemporary movements of direct resistance, north and south, to capitalist modernization – for example, anti-nuclear movements, opposition to agricultural transgenics, resistance to big dams. The concluding session will address the issue of modernity itself, its model of temporality and the assumption that history is future-directed.

Les Sentiers de L’Utopie/Paths Through Utopias: Film Screening

I wish I could make this. The film looks great. I’ve been told that the screening is already booked up so it might be tricky to sneak in. The French version of the film and book are available for free at http://www.editions-zones.fr/

Paths Through Utopias

Friday 11th March,  6.30pm Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Sq.

Free and open to all (English Subtitles).

“Blurring the fluid boundaries between present and future, documentary and fiction, Paths Through Utopias is a utopian road movie exploring a post-capitalist Europe. Shot during a 7 month journey in 2008 visiting ten utopian experiments, the film is half of the book-film project published in France by Editions Zones.

From the direct action Climate Camp set up illegally besides Heathrow airport to a hamlet squatted by French art punks, occupied self-managed Serbian factories to a free love commune in an ex Stasi base, this magicorealist travelogue transports us to a parallel universe where money is worthless and private property has been abolished.”

Film by Isabelle Fremeaux (Birkbeck), John Jordan and Kypros Kyprianou.  Music by Isa Suarez.  Book by Isabelle Fremeaux and John Jordan.

The details of the screening are courtesy of Birkbeck. Further details of the project can be found here.

Fight Back: New Book on UK Student Protests Released

One of the many lessons of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is that the very being and becoming of protest and revolution is necessarily bound up with a process of self-reflection. “Proletarian revolutions,” for Marx, constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course. They return to what has apparently already been accomplished in order to begin the task again” (Marx, 2010 [1869, 2nd ed.]: 150).

Amidst accusations of factionalism and recent criticisms of the treatment of the current NUS president (for an excellent riposte see), it is comforting to see that the student movement in the UK has returned, if you like, to the task at hand and engaged in a process of composition, organization, and reflection. It would have been much easier to cash in the activist Nectar points and call it a day. Instead, we see the assembling of new connections and trajectories that have the potential to create constituent spaces of debate and dissent. Perhaps, I’m just stubbornly optimistic. Whatever the case, I do hope that the recent release of Fight Back, an E-book on the student protests, will open further points of contact and solidarity as well as stimulate healthy disagreement and vigorous discussion.

All the details of the book can be accessed here. A book launch will be held on March 2nd (all the details here)

Liebig 14: Eviction

Liebig 14 Housing Project, August 2010 (photo: author)

Naja. I feel really guilty not to have posted earlier on the eviction of residents living in the Liebig 14 alternative housing project in Berlin-Friedrichshain. They were evicted on the 2nd of February in a massive police operation after losing a length legal fight and despite attempts to find a negotiated settlement.

The house was first squatted in 1990. The recent fall of the Berlin Wall had offered a rare opportunity for various social groupings to create radically new and autonomous spaces in former East Berlin. Liebig 14 was once such space and part of a wave of squatting that occupied abandoned tenement blocks in the districts of Mitte, Friedrichshain, and Prenzlauer Berg (there were a few squats in Lichtenberg and Treptow as well). The violent clearing of squatters on Mainzer Strasse in Berlin-Friedrichshain in November 1990 led to the legalization of many remaining squats. The Berlin housing board took over ownership of Liebig 14 in 1992. The squatters signed a lease which made them legal residents of the house. Even though the house was sold in 1999, the lease was passed on to those who continued to live in the house. As I understand it, the legal grounds for their recent eviction are based on a technicality, namely the construction of an additional door  in the early 1990s. The door was built to offer some safety against attacks by far Right groups, a serious problem at the time.

As Andrej Holm at gentrificationblog has rightly argued, the eviction of the residents of Liebig 14 is a sober reminder of the close relationship between law and private property. The lockstep march of gentrification has become something of a commonplace feature in inner-city districts in Berlin and other major German cities. Liebig 14 was seen, in this respect, as both a site and a symbol for anti-gentrification activists who were seeking to create workable alternatives to the uneven geographies of development. But Wednesday’s eviction and the violence that ensued should also be seen as part of a broader historical geography of necessity and to which a “right to housing” was a key feature. The bitter clashes between police and protesters should prompt us therefore to not only look back to the eviction of the Mainzer Strasse squatters in 1990 but to the violent confrontations that characterized an earlier wave of squatting in the West Berlin districts of Kreuzberg and Schöneberg (I’m thinking here of the events of 12.12.1980 and the protests that followed the death of Klaus-Jürgen Rattay). As Holm points out, we can even track back to the late 19th century and the first wave of Häuserkämpfe that were precipitated by the violent clearing of illegal settlements that had sprung up as a result of a severe housing crisis. Creative destruction and violence, resistance and protest have, it would seem, a long history in Berlin.

I’m in the midst of compiling articles on the Liebig 14 eviction. Andrej Holm has posted thoughtfully on this (here and here). See the following in Indymedia and the Berliner Zeitung (here, here , here, and here). Die Taz has a number of interesting articles as well (here, here, and here). I will try to update this shortly. I’ve included a video below (thanks to gentrificationblog for the clip from Tagesthemen).

 

Producing the Urban Commons

This may be of interest to some. It is a CFP for a session that I’m co-organizing with Colin McFarlane and Gordon MacLeod for the International Critical Geography Conference in August 2011. While the official deadline is tomorrow, we can accept late abstracts until early next week.

FINAL CFP: ‘Producing the Urban Commons’

International Critical Geography conference, Frankfurt, August 16^th-20^th 2011

Organisers: Colin McFarlane (Durham), Gordon MacLeod (Durham), and Alex Vasudevan (Nottingham)

The idea of the ‘commons’ has seen a resurgence of interest in recent years, whether as an ideal, a set of practices, or a political ethos for assembling more just and equal worlds (e.g. Hardt and Negri, 2009; Linebaugh, 2008). From debates on the ‘idea’ of communism (e.g. Badiou, 2010; Douzinas and Žižek, 2010; Swyngedouw, 2010) or urban cooperatives, or through the development of postcapitalist alternatives to a renewed interest in anarchism, the commons has become a rallying call through which intellectuals and activists are mapping possible futures. The idea of the commons has a strong urban tradition. The emergence of ‘rights to the city’ movements, the elaborations of municipal socialism, and the possibilities of radical participatory budgeting all speak to the constitution of radical alternative urbanisms predicated on practices of making common. In this session, we ask how the notion of the commons might take shape as an explicitly urban project, and how it relates to existing and emerging scholarly debates and activist practices that seek a more just city. We seek to critically interrogate the possibilities and limits of the commons, and consider how it might figure as a counterpoint to the intensification of urban enclosure internationally. In doing so, we aim to examine the possibilities that are opened up, or indeed closed down, by the commons in relation to translocal politics and solidarities. We seek papers that engage with one or more of the following themes, although contributions need not be limited to these parameters:

• Reclaiming the city for the commons
• The commons and the radical urban imagination
• Activism and the production and/or reinvention of the urban commons
• Urban social movements and the commons
• The possibilities disclosed or delimited by the commons for translocal movements
• Potentiality, the commons and radical urban futures
• Urban informality and the prospect of the commons
• Theorizing the urban commons (theoretical approaches to the commons from Marx to Negri)
• The geography of the urban commons
• Commoning, composition and assemblage in the city
• The limits of the urban commons as idea, practice and/or activism

Please send a title and abstract by Friday January 7^th to the organizers: Colin McFarlane (colin.mcfarlane@durham.ac.uk), Gordon MacLeod (gordon.macleod@durham.ac.uk), and Alex Vasudevan (alexander.vasudevan@nottingham.ac.uk). The session is part of the ‘Oppositional Struggles Worldwide’ strand of the ICGC organized by Andy Cumbers, David Featherstone and Rebecca Ryland.

What is to be done (next)?

A Happy New Year to all!

It seems that the holiday season has ushered in a period of reflection, debate, and disagreement within the growing student movement here in the UK (not to mention the wider anti-cuts campaign). If the first wave of protests were a symbolic success, how to now move forward remains a predictably thorny issue. At stake is the relationship between the very aims of the movement and the organizational means for achieving such aims. Laurie Penny’s December 24th article in the Guardian has certainly drawn attention to many of the issues at stake here and has prompted a number of responses including Alex Callinicos in the Guardian as well a post by Lenin’s Tomb, a response by Penny in the New Statesmen, and a further reply by Callinicos (scroll down to bottom of post by Lenin’s Tomb).

If I have enjoyed Penny’s writing on the new student movement, I do have some reservations with her post-ideological reading of the protests. Penny may rightly impugn the “old organizational structures of revolution” with their ideological heavy-lifting and outmoded politics, but is there not a risk that we simply replace the last rites of a “Petrograd-enactment society” with the empty theatrics of a Downing St. Rose Garden .

Let me be clear. I’m not suggesting that the kind of creative and committed activism lauded by Penny is in anyway similar to the vacuous post-political settlement advocated by the coalition with its baleful “new politics” sloganeering (see her excellent critique of the recent appointment of Simon Hughes as the friendly “face” of higher education cuts). But I do worry a little that there is something of a discursive homology between her critique of older forms of leftist organization and the coalition’s own attack on traditional parliamentary politics. It has, of course, been business as usual in Whitehall while Penny’s passionate appeal to a new form of resistance has, in contrast, highlighted  the potentiality of assembling a genuinely progressive politics. But does this mean that we need to “de-regulate resistance” as she suggests? Isn’t there a danger in attempting to retrofit the language of neo-liberalism for progressive ends? Are we ultimately talking about a form of situationist détournement or the general subsumption of protest under the kind of capitalist realism described with such acuity by Mark Fisher?

I suppose my worry is that the political Right has always been remarkably successful in adopting and reworking the strategies and tactics of the Left (cue recent and ongoing discussion on mutuals: here and here). If the protests and occupations over the past few months have exposed austerity politics as so much “ideological flim-flammery” (I’m adopting a phrase of Penny’s), is there a risk that such a “reimagining of the British Left” becomes equally exposed to the machinations of counter-revolution and the forces of reaction. How do we avoid the “capture” and transmutation of real politics by the sectaries of new politicking?

I am not, it should be said, endorsing a return to the SWP as a workable model of alterity or resistance nor do I wish to see a return to petty factionalisms or “old hierarchies.” Rather, and building on Penny’s recent posts as well as those of some of her interlocutors, I want to endorse a view that reconciles vigorous theoretical debate (and disagreement) with practical planning and organization. While this should encourage us to re-read our Debord, Deleuze, and Negri, it should also prompt us to return to the Marx that penned the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoléon. And all of this also says nothing of the many practical lessons learned and still to be gained and shared (see the following thoughtful posts from the UCL occupation: here, here, here, and here). Whatcver the case, the student protests have made a strong case for re-claiming education as a public good and I think there is considerable potential here for composing a broad coalition of groups that share a concern with what it might mean to re-invent the commons. As Lauren Berlant has pointed out on her blog, “the crisis of the university is the crisis of publicness, of whether there is a general public worth investing in.” For Berlant, it is not enough to respond to such a crisis by making “good arguments” to sustain the current system. Rather it is a case of “generating new combinations and ecologies of relation.” Berlant, to be sure, is writing about the nature of research in the university but I do think that her argument could be extended to the composition of the political in the recent round of protests and occupations. I realize that this may seem to herald a return to a modest ideological commitment but I think it is one that is full of radical possibilities, possibilities that may finally offer a line of flight from the certifiably dead end of neo-liberalism.

Further Update: December 23

1. Geographies of the Kettle: Fantastic piece by Rory Rowan on recent student-led protests in the UK and the technique of ‘kettling’ used by the police. While kettling may be seen, in the first instance, as a spatial strategy predicated on containment and restraint (under the auspices of maintaining public order), it is the anticipatory logic of kettling that Rowan rightly draws attention to. Kettling, for Rowan, is spatially performative. It is not only intended to produce violence but also the spectacle of violence for mass media consumption. For Rowan, the attempt to construct an image of violent and unruly protesters is ultimately a deliberate strategy “to delegitimize protests and re-symbolize legitimate protest as unlawful ‘riot’.” Of course, none of this should take away from the fact that kettling (witness the events on Westminster Bridge on December 9th) has increasingly shifted from a strict logic of containment and image management to a temporary and violent form of retributive punishment. That such new forms of enclosure are in fact creating the necessary conditions of possibility for the exercise of violent repression is a very worrying development.

Protest poster courtesy of http://infinitethought.cinestatic.com/

2. Epistemologies of Protest: In the article noted above, Rowan also makes a compelling point about the need to re-think the spatiality of lawful protest. He writes, “it is time to return to Deleuze and Guattari, to Debord and the Situationists, to Lefebvre, even to Tiqqun and Hakim Bey and to take them seriously (perhaps for the first time). A form of protest is needed that places dispersal over concentration, mobility over stasis and perhaps even disruption over symbolism.”

There is much to reflect on here (has Deleuze’s “Society of Control” ever seemed more apposite?). Perhaps it is not surprising, in this respect, that the teach-in at the National Gallery that took place on the same evening as the protests on Parliament Square focused on precisely this issue. Set-against the backdrop of Manet’s Execution of Maximillian, those gathered together in Room 43 of the National Gallery discussed and debated the Nomadic Hive Manifesto (“On Beeing and Nothingness”). All the details can be found here. Some predictably tedious comments below the line. The text, as I understand it, is meant to be open source and a work-in-progress and I have to say that I like how the manifesto reworks the relationship between dispersal and concentration. Not only are we dealing here with an aesthetic form of life but a new set of emancipatory assemblages that resist closure and containment.

Teach-in on December 9th at the National Gallery (Room 43). Manet's Execution of Maximilian in the background ©Kristian Buus

Cultures of Occupation and Demonstration: Senate House Tonight!

This via Nina Power at Infinite Thought – looks great!

In the context of numerous student occupations of their universities and mass demonstrations, the seminar Marxism in Culture has organised a special session on 17th December at the Wolfson Room, Insitute of Historical Research, Senate House, 5,30. All welcome.

‘Cultures of Occupation and Demonstration: 2010/1968/1917’

Steve Edwards
Introduction

Sophie Buckland
UCL Occupation

Art Against Cuts

Daniel Lemberger Cooper
Royal Holloway Occupation

Jacob Bard Rosenberg
Birkbeck Occupation

Esther Leslie
Free Universities and Self-Managing Education

Warren Carter
Atelier populaire oui, Atelier bourgeois non: Posters and Graffiti in
May ‘68

Alberto Toscano
Between the Sociological Imagination and the Negative University: The
Occupations of the Sociology Faculty at Trento, 1966-68

David Mabb
Street Art of the Russian Revolution: Students, Teachers, Artists