Housing as Commons: Housing Alternatives as Response to the Current Urban Crisis

Experiences of the struggle for housing, ignited by the lack of social and affordable housing and foreclosure evictions as well as practices of establishing shared and self-managed housing areas, unfold in a world of harsh inequalities. In such a context, it becomes crucially important to re-think the need to define common urban worlds “from below', to trace contemporary practices of urban commoning through which people re-define what is to be shared and how, in, against and beyond the dominant.

Connecting to a rich literature on the importance of commons and of practices of commoning for the creation of emancipated societies, the authors discuss whether housing struggles and co-habitation experiences may contribute in crucial ways to the development of a commoning culture, and explore a variety of urban contexts in search for concrete examples that illustrate the potentialities of urban commoning.

This book aims at contributing to the ongoing discussion on the right to housing by collecting and comparing approaches to the housing question (Hodkinson 2012) that are in search of alternative ways of housing production and culture. The current urban crisis makes it urgent to revisit the discussion on housing and to connect theory with everyday practices of sharing and living together for the making of common lives. Thus, this book collects contributions that explicitly connect the discussion on the potentialities of urban commoning with experiences of inhabiting and producing housing considered as commons.